Hacking the iPod: How I Earned $65K in High School (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Hacking the iPod: How I Earned $65K in High School (2012)

gizmodo.com

57 pointsikeboy22 comments

So, if the article is to be believed Apple didn't want him buying broken iPods that were under warranty and sending them in for warranty repairs. How the hell is that OK? The warranty is transferable. What grounds could an Apple lawyer stand on if the products are under warranty?

His operation probably wasn't legitimate ("before I could even legally hold a paypall account"). It's not OK but Apple probably could have made his life 'difficult'.

I think he meant before he could contractually have a paypal account. In my experience, this was not hard to bypass as a minor...

Uncle figure grounds.

I'm still trying to get past the idea that any significant number of people would rather SELL a broken iPod that was still under warranty, rather than get a warranty replacement themselves.

I return at least a few hard drives that have failed for customers that are still under warranty per year. I tell them they can send the unit back or can pay me a little to send it back. Quite a large percentage of them just give me the drive and don't worry about it.

People, in general, hate dealing with warranty returns. For many items you have to follow pretty specific instructions to avoid your warranty being declared void.

Huh, I did exactly the same thing for a few years. At one point I had about 25 iPods (almost all 3rd gens) in various states of functioning. I made a little money, but nothing crazy.

The one and only 3rd get I still have and use daily I bought on ebay listed as "completely dead, doesn't do anything" for something like $30. The day I got it, I turned it on, and it has worked perfectly every minute I've had it.

"Completely dead", until you plug it in with FireWire, which will force-charge it. USB's request-charge system still bugs me.

It's awesome that you're still using an iPod daily. Did you mod it at all?

Actually I never did plug it into Firewire.

I've never even opened the case on my 3rd gen iPod - it works perfectly, no mods.

I also did exactly the same thing, and I'm the same age! I now have a small collection of old iPods. I didn't make much money, but I collected a large amount of music, and made friends. In fact, the iPod & iTunes were a major part of getting things started with all 5 of my ex-girlfriends, and a major part of holding those relationships together long-distance. I did make a little money from an iBook repair business when I was 15, but then I spent it all to upgrade one of the iBooks with an 80GB disk and 640MB of RAM.

These days I'm using an iPod Video 5.5G with a Tarkan iFlash-Dual SD adaptor, with a PQI Air Card for integrated WiFi.

Check out the thread of iPod collectors on MacRumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/calling-all-ipod-collect...

And of course, the Head-Fi modding thread: http://www.head-fi.org/t/566780/official-ipod-video-classic-...

I was a moderator on the iPodLinux forums back in the day, and I've kept in touch with a couple of guys from there. Say hi if you remember Podzilla!

If you're a developer and can help me patch Rockbox to add serial Rx, I want to turn my iPod into a USB HID keyboard. I'll get around to it, but these days I'm busy with work. http://hackaday.com/2015/06/27/keymouserial-solves-your-rasp...

"Nanos? Forget about it." - Watch this space. I now work for a flash memory manufacturer in Taiwan.

Hi and awesome. :)

"These days I'm using an iPod Video 5.5G with a Tarkan iFlash-Dual SD adaptor, with a PQI Air Card for integrated WiFi."

I'm curious - are you using SD card(s) mainly to:

A) Increase capacity

B) Decrease weight

C) Decrease power consumption (??)

D) Use wi-fi

A) Sort of. I have a SanDisk 512GB SDXC card, and it formats correctly. But the iPod's iTunesDB library is limited to 35000 songs. So for most people, there's no point in having more than 128GB. Rockbox is not my music player, because I want my play counts to sync back to iTunes. I still want more capacity, but see my explanation in D) WiFi.

B) Weight is not an issue for me (I started with a 1G in February 2002 - everything else seems light).

C) Battery life is longer with SD cards than hard drives, but that's not a big issue for me. Sync speed is also faster, which is a small bonus.

D). WiFi is the big feature that put the iPod back in my pocket. (It was gone from October 2011 when I got a 64GB iPhone 4S until March 2015).

My iPhone's got a lot of space, but 10GB of Wiki2Touch (offline Wikipedia), 2GB of Galileo Offline Maps take a toll, before I even start to sync my 85GB main music library (my external library is over 300GB, but it isn't duplicate-sorted; it's the backups from friends' iPods).

When I had an old iBook with a 10GB hard drive, and a 30GB iPod, I backed up my entire disk to my pocket. That was awesome. If my bag were stolen, I'd lose my laptop and external hard drive but not my pocket-sized backup.

Now I have a lot more data, and I want to access it from my phone. The 512GB SDXC lets me backup my laptop. The PQI Air Card only supports microSD, but I use an SD female to microSD male ribbon cable adaptor. Power to the card comes from the iPod through the iFlash.

My "WiPod" is therefore effectively an AirStash (SD to WiFi) and iPod in one. It's also useful for copying photos from friends' cameras.

During many of my iPod-less days, I had a Raspberry Pi in an iPod shell in the belt clip case. That had host USB, so I could also mount iPhones using libimobiledevice and copy music from friends. Most of the time I just used it for photos, though. I'm still trying to find a way to get host USB into my iPod, though. The CoreWind WiFiG25 is my current favourite (it's small enough to fit in the iPod's case). But CoreWind still didn't finish the WiFi driver for Debian.

If backup is so important, why didn't I use mSata for 1TB instead of 512GB? Because I only have 512GB of data, and accessing the files is as important as carrying them. Everybody uses SD, and sharing over WiFi to my phone is super useful. And I can backup my laptop to the SD card (only 2 USB ports) while my iPhone and mouse are plugged in.

Hi all. I wrote this 3+ years ago. This wasn't a crazy operation but it was a pretty lucrative and fun side gig in my teenage years. Happy to answer any questions here or on twitter @teddy.

I'm just wondering what did you do with the money? This was a solid source of income for someone that age, did it make any massive changes or just increased your quality of life?

IMO this is not really impressive. He bought iPods that were still under warranty, transferred the warranty and paid the price of shipping. There is no hack about this, he's following existing policy laid down by Apple.

That's what he did after his legitimate iPod repair and parts selling business became untenable due to shrinking component sizes.

small clarification - that was $65k gross, not nett. sounds like a lot of it went back into broken/spare part purchases.

I wonder if they paid tax?

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