Friday night my iPod Touch died. I had plugged it in before going to bed and iTunes beeped at me with a sync error. Apparently it was having trouble talking to the device. Whenever I'm having trouble with my iPod I reboot it. So I turned it off and then back on again. Once it turned on i got the screen you get when you have a new iPod. A picture of iTunes with a standard iPod chord running to it telling you you must sync.

Now iTunes gave me a different error. I'm part of the Developer Program so I tried restoring it with the Xcode tools as well. No luck. It was obvious my iPod was not going to recover from whatever had doomed it.

I ran it by the local Mac story on saturday morning, they said to do warranty work I had to go to an Apple store or mail it to Apple. I didn't have time to make the hour and a half drive to the nearest Apple store so I decided to go the mail route.

This is my first experience with Apple Care. I've never purchased it before because I've never had problems before. However since my 1.5 year old iMac started freaking out and I was told it would cost me $900 to fix it I've thought maybe spending some cash on Apple Care isn't a bad idea.

To do the mail route you login to Apple's support site and request service. The first step in the process is diagnosing the problem. Lets see my options. There's about 6 main categories, each with about 5 sub categories. Some of the main categories include battery problems, display problems, other hardware problems. That sounds promising. Nope, nothing related. Stuff about broken buttons.

By now I'm getting frustrated, there clearly is no option describing my problem which is "Trying to restore the iPod in iTunes fails". I finally settle for "Home button does not bring user to home screen", only because it has space to describe the problem.

I describe my problem and submit the service request. Within an hour I got an email from Apple stating that my request had been processed and I should receive an empty box from in two days that I could then use to send the iPod in.

This at least went very smoothly. Tuesday I got a box. I put the iPod in it and called Fed-Ex on Wednesday morning. They arrived about midway through the day to take the box and I'm now waiting for Apple to receive it.

So far the experience has been almost great. Apple was prompt and I feel like for a mail in service things couldn't have gone more smoothly. The only real worry I have is I'll get my iPod back in a few days with a note saying "There is nothing wrong with your home button. Have a nice Day." I know there's nothing wrong with my home button. Why doesn't your stupid website have an Other option with a space to write down my problem.

Anyway. We'll see how they fix it. I'm assuming they'll get it, realize it's dead and send me a refurbished unit. Wouldn't hurt my feelings since I somehow managed to get some dirt under the screen. You can't really see it on white screen, but dark screens (like when it's turned off) really show the dust particles. However I'd definitely settle for just getting my iPod back in good working condition.