Hands-On Report--Our iPod Mini at 7 Weeks and Counting

On Friday, February 20th, we stood in line at the Tysons Corner Apple Store until the appointed hour of 6pm for an opportunity to be among the first to buy a retail edition of Apple's brand new iPod Mini. Despite the many online and print media whines that they were overpriced at $249 and sales would bomb, we believed otherwise and thought they'd go fast and be hard to get. After using an original 5-GB and then 10-GB and 30-GB iPods we were certain that the iPod Mini would be our perfect digital music player. After we took home our silver iPod Mini, we were quickly convinced of this (see our highly enthusiastic February 23rd review).

Our New England Editor, while not particularly a digital music buff, takes hour-long early morning walks in his rural Maine neighborhood to start the day. Dana's walking companion was recently sidelined with an injury so he decided to get a 15-GB iPod to listen to audio books during his morning constitutional. Our enthusiastic endorsement along with the iPod Mini's lighter weight and $50 cheaper price tag convinced him to get a Mini instead. With the nearest Apple Store a 5-hour drive away and the online Apple Store out of stock, Dana opted to get a silver one from an online retailer--one of the last as the first 100,000 manufactured completely sold out right afterwards.

Our iPod Mini is still as good as new, with nary a scratch on it's sleek anodized case despite being carried virtually everywhere we have gone since February 20th. This includes more than a half dozen cross-country flights as well as tooling around town in various cities to work. It still pumps out great digital music from our collection that grew by over 25% during the Pepsi/iTunes free song promo.

Unfortunately, Dana was not as lucky. After about a week's use, just an hour a day during his morning walks, his iPod Mini occasionally began to emit static. The frequency of static rapidly increased and the sound became distorted as well. If he lightly tapped his Mini's case, the sound would improve somewhat or get worse. After consulting with an AppleCare technician, Dana was shipped a cardboard coffin and he sent if off to be repaired or replaced. This was a little over two weeks ago. Dana was hopeful to get it back repaired or replaced right away as the warranty proclaims. AppleCare immediately gave him a replacement order with the Apple Store but after a week the order still showed a 3-5 week wait.

Then, last week it became apparent that the static problem in Dana's iPod Mini was more widespread and may, in fact, be caused by a design or manufacturing defect or both. There are claims of a poor design in the connector between the headphone jack's mini-board and the main electronic board and poor soldering of the pins in the connector (see this web site).

The jack board is solidly connected to the top of the iPod Mini's case while the main board is "loose" in the case. The connector between them is solid rather than flexible so it would receive stress from any movement of the main board. It is not clear from the articles or pictures that we have seen that the main board can actually move around inside the case. However, our unopened iPod Mini's aluminum case can be flexed a bit on the front and back with a little finger tip pressure just below the top in the area of the connection at issue. Doing so produced no static.

We are hopeful that the boards' solid connection is not an inherent design flaw and that either only a few had a poor soldering job or that there is some other isolated problem. CNet reported that Apple is looking into the issue and provided this Apple quote: "Apple is aware of a few isolated reports online of iPod Mini audio static."

Meanwhile, yesterday Dana received notice that his replacement iPod Mini has shipped. This may indicate that Apple has either fixed the problem or has confirmed that it is an isolated problem. At least it means that a continuing supply of new iPod Minis still exists and Apple is allocating some for repair/replacements.

Our iPod Mini continues to work fine.