What makes the iPod battery wear out quicker?

dferigmu

I'm asking because I plan on buying an iPod with an iMac and I'm wondering what I should do to make the battery last the longest.



Does not using it constantly wear the battery out? What about the battery level? Is it better to recharge right before the battery wears out, or recharge after it completely wore out?

buonrotto

You mean not just how to keep a chanrge longer, but how to maintain the battery in the long term, right?



I'm really not sure it makes much of a difference whether you completely drain the battery or charge it incrementally. If anything, draining it completely might be better in the long run, but the battery life of a litium ion battery is good for so many cumulative charges. That is, it doesn't matter a lot how often you charge the battery or how full the battery is when you do it, just that after so many gallons of fuel has gone through the tank, so to speak, it can't hold as much of a charge.



The best way to make sure your battery lasts long is to not crank up the volume all the time, don't play with the buttons all the time (rewind, fast forward, etc. constantly), keep the backlight off and not expose the iPod to extreme temperatures.

pbg4 dude

Also, reset the iPod after disconnecting from the computer. When you connect to the computer, the iPod's internal clock gets set and starts keeping time. This uses juice. To keep this from happening, do a reset (on my 2G iPod I hold the Play-pause & menu keys down until the Apple shows on the screen) on your iPod. This increased both my and my friend's 3G iPods' battery lives.

dferigmu

Quote:

Originally posted by PBG4 Dude

Also, reset the iPod after disconnecting from the computer. When you connect to the computer, the iPod's internal clock gets set and starts keeping time. This uses juice. To keep this from happening, do a reset (on my 2G iPod I hold the Play-pause & menu keys down until the Apple shows on the screen) on your iPod. This increased both my and my friend's 3G iPods' battery lives.

Doesn't that mean I have to always reload the iPod with music?

pbg4 dude

Quote:

Originally posted by dferigmu

Doesn't that mean I have to always reload the iPod with music?

No. This reset doesn't affect the data (music) on the iPod's hard drive.

neutrino23

Another thing I've heard of (haven't tried) is to periodically erase the drive and reload your music. This has the effect of defragmenting the disk. If you rarely add or delete music this won't be needed often. The idea is that if the music is scattered all over the disk the system spends more energy driving the head all over the place reading files. I guess once or twice a year would be good enough.

relic

I'm on my third iPod now, would probably be on my first if it wasn?t for the lousy battery. It?s mostly my fault though; see I?m a compulsive wheelie-moving junkie. I love to listen to only 30 seconds of a song then move along. This disorder usually develops overtime when you have 30+ gigs of friggen music. Must go to the next song, only on number 13,000 have 200,000 to go. Anyway this for some reason puts an enormous strain on not only the immediate battery life (I get an average of 5 hours instead of the quoted push play don?t touch that wheel 12) but also on the batteries ability to keep a charge. My iPods don?t last more then a year because of this non-curable compulsive disorder. Now if you excuse me I have some spinning I got to do.