The dirty secret about the iPod that's no longer a secret

In Citizen Marketers the authors discuss the success of memes and how they have helped get people's frustrations out into cyber space. McConnell and Huba define a meme as. "a cultural transmitter that distinguishes an idea from the billions of others that float in the primordial soup of daily human existence." A better definition is given by Richard Dawkins, the creater of the term, "Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process, which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." The book discusses Apple's "iPod's Dirty Secret" which grew after Apple told Casey Neistat that it would cost him $255 plus a mail-in fee to replace the battery on his 18-month old ipod.

I remember this story from when it first broke in 2002. I was begging my mother for an ipod for Christmas, however she refused to spend that kind of money on a gadget that may not last longer than a year-and-a-half. Surprisingly it's a fond memory of my middle-school years. We were walking my dog around the neighborhood and I remember telling her I wanted an ipod so that I could listen to music while walking the dog or riding the bus to school without having to transport a cd player around with. She firmly told me no because she had read a story in the Washington Post about how ipod's were just expensive gadgets that became garbage after the battery died. After pouting to my father about how my mother refused to buy me the latest must have, he finally bought me an mp3 player. Unfortunately for me it was a Nike mp3 player that only held 30 songs at a time.

Since then, I have gone through three ipods (and will be purchasing my fourth in the next two weeks) because of battery related problems/ screen cracking. All three of my ipods have obtained cracked screens that slowly spread to where I am unable to view what songs I am listening to. Has anyone else had problems with their ipod's breaking on them and then getting suckered in to buying a new one?