Apple's Own Cottage Industry/Milliamp Repair Review

Full Disclosure: I was contacted by Milliamp.com and offered a free repair of my iPods in exchange for a review here. Since a review of a repair is pretty cut and dry (Either it was repaired or not), I thought I would weave it into an article. If you have any objections to this whole exchange, please feel free to raise them in a civilized manner. It could help decide how things like this will play out in the future here at Cerebral Pop.

Apple's iPod is easily the standard when it comes to mp3 players. Whether it be marketing, design, or actual hardware, they've pretty much become synonymous with the tech. The problem is, they aren't exactly built to last.

I joined the iPod game pretty late; Starting with the 6th generation model that sported 160gb for my almost 100gbs of music. In about a half a year, it started syncing everything onto it's hard drive as lumps of unreadable information instead of mp3s. I returned it to the store, and when the Apple "Genius" couldn't figure out why, he gave me a new one. This one lasted over a year before it refused to play any sound out of one side of any headphones plugged into it.

This time, I was out of warranty. Apple had unleashed the iPod Touch, and they wanted to encourage each and every one of their existing customers to upgrade rather than get a repair, so the Geniuses weren't much help. Since I am a cheapskate and refused to pay Apple's exorbitant repair costs, I turned to a now defunct website. They got the job done, but another half a year or so brought about a new problem; It appeared that my logic board was fried.

I put it off and turned to my wife's first generation iPod Nano to get by, listening to my daily podcasts and such. It lasted me almost a year, but eventually the headphone jack problem I'd had with my own iPod began to plague me once again. The site I had used before was seemingly non-existent, so I fired off a round of frustrated tweets, and Milliamp heeded my call.

They're a bit more professional than the other site I had used. Better Business Bureau accredited, which helps ease the mind when shipping someone a tiny piece of hardware you paid hundreds of dollars for. It was also nice to be kept up to speed on every single step of the process via email, though, having two iPods there at once made the cookie-cutter form emails glaringly unpersonable (Understandably so). Word of warning: I was told the logic board problem is pretty common in 6th generation iPods, though they don't normally repair those. They offered to for me, I suppose so I would say lots of nice things about them (Though I'm unsure of anything negative I could really say.)

Apple has managed to start a cottage industry around it's time-sensitive products. Going the route of repairing your iPods through one of these sites is most definitely cheaper than their solutions, and Milliamp.com is easily recommended. They got the job done, and were friendly and helpful throughout the process. Sure, there are hundreds of other sites out there, so by all means, shop around for the best price, but be careful. I haven't gotten scammed yet, but this whole situation seems ripe for scammers. Milliamp has enough verifications, accreditations, and repair videos to help put you at ease, so I feel alright recommending them.