Product endorsement

I got one of the very first iPod minis for my birthday in 2004 and loved it. I was walking about forty minutes each way to work, and an iPod mini seemed the perfect solution for how to make productive use of that commute time. 4 gigs of memory was plenty of audiobook and music for my needs, and I used that mini almost every single day. I was never really happy with the battery life, though, and needed to charge it up more frequently than Apple said I had to. Still, that was no big problem since I was only using it a couple of hours each day.
Over years of heavy use, though, the battery life got shorter and shorter...and shorter. By last fall I had maybe fifteen minutes of use per charge, and after that it was basically useless to me. I put it in a drawer and started using Inki's old shuffle instead.
Getting an authorized iPod battery replacement is notoriously difficult and expensive. Apple builds them so they're almost impossible to get into, and getting them to do the job costs more than the unit is actually worth. On principle I despise this trend of building black-box products so you either have to pay for manufacturer service or chuck it and buy a new one.
It didn't use to be this way. When the accelerator on my first car, a 1962 VW bug, stopped working, Dad and I fixed it ourselves, reconnecting the line from the pedal to the fuel intake so when you press down on the accelerator, the fuel intake arm was lifted and you got more fuel in the fuel/air mixture in the carburetor and...poof...more thrust. If I recall correctly, all we needed was a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and afterwards I knew a lot more about how cars worked. Now they build cars so you can't even replace the battery yourself without a special tool to remove a retaining bar whose only purpose is apparently to make sure you can't replace the battery yourself. Just trust us, say the manufacturers, we know best, and you'd only mess things up anyway.
Screw that.
So I found ipodjuice.com, which offered a replacement battery and the necessary special tool to get into the iPod with, and for just under $30 I got a replacement battery, tool kit, and instructions sent to my door. It was pretty straightforward -- and neat to look inside the iPod and see how it works. There are a couple of intimidating notes about being really, REALLY careful not to touch the pad that makes the scroll wheel work --and to do it all as quickly as possible before the glue that holds the end pieces on dries out exposed to the air -- but it went great and now my mini will play for 10 hours or so on a charge (a bit less if you are working the scroll wheel a lot, since the memory is an actual hard drive with moving parts, so skipping around a lot drains power).
Anyway, in the instructions they sent, they asked us to let other people know about them if we were satisfied with their product, and that's what I'm doing. I got a battery with 50% more life (750 mAh) than the one Apple uses and the satisfaction of doing it myself and not being a good and docile consumer like Apple wants me to be. And I saved money: I checked with the Apple authorized retailer here in town just to see what they would have charged me; they would have sent it somewhere and done the job for me for 699 kroner ($140).
No wonder they don't want us doing this ourselves. Or thinking for ourselves, for that matter.