Hands-On Report--iPod nano Scratch Lawsuits Keep Coming, So How's Ours Doing?

The number of lawsuits filed against Apple over the iPod nano now stands at 13, according to The San Francisco Chronicle's web site SFGate.com. The latest lawsuit, filed in San Mateo County, also complains about an alleged proclivity for the iPod nano to become too scratched too easily. It also asks for class action status and that Apple recall the affected iPod nanos and replace them. Apple has long maintained that there is nothing defective in the iPod nano and that it is made out of the same material as all recent iPods, none of which have generated scratching defect complaints. (More...)

As these lawsuits pile up, we keep checking our long-term test 4GB iPod nano. It was ordered two days after Apple announced the iPod nano on September 7, 2005, and arrived September 14th so it is one of the very first made. Our iPod nano has been in pants pockets, jacket pockets and purses without a case. It has been on long walks, on long airplane flights and in several countries. When not in use, it sits bare on a desk attached to an iMac G5. At Macworld we bought its first case. For its condition, see image at right--click on it for a much larger image. Click here for the back side--the black stripe covers the engraved personal message.

Sure, our nano has a few small scratches and scuff marks on the front which one can only really see by moving it around under a light. They are more obvious on the back, up close and under a bright light. But they are nothing more than might be expected for such an object given the way that it is used. One can see clearly from even the small image that it does not look bad, not to mention that it has not become so scratched as to be unusable as many of the lawsuits claim.

Our iPod nano is white. As we stated in our hands-on review back in September, we picked white because that is the Apple iPod unofficial trademark color and because it is less likely than black to show scratches and scuff marks. Maybe the black color accounts for some of the complaints about scratches but the lawsuits don't focus on color being the problem. In fact, many of them complain about the screen becoming so scratched as to render the iPod nano unusable and that would be totally independent of color alone. Given our experience, we just do not see how that is possible without carelessly carrying it in a pocket full of keys or coins or purposefully using coarse sandpaper or some other scarring agent on the screen area. [Bill Fox]