Changing your iPod’s Gender

At dinner with my Yankee friends last night I was called on to provide iPod technical support. Young Jamie’s iPod mini wasn’t being found by iTunes on his iBook when he plugged it in; it would show up as a mounted drive on the desktop, but he couldn’t get music onto it.

Turns out that his iPod spent a brief time, before Jamie got an iBook, as a “Windows iPod” and it seems that once an iPod has suffered that fate it is rendered unusable in the Mac world until it undergoes gender realignment.

The solution: get the latest iPod Updater from Apple, run it, and select the “restore factory settings” option. This will erase everything from the iPod, but leave you with a fresh, clean, Mac-compatible iPod. It worked, and Jamie is rocking out to Billy Joel as we speak.

Comments

Isaac Grant's picture
Isaac Grant on August 11, 2005 - 14:27 Permalink

While I’m sure that the problems were real, I can attest to the fact that you can use a windows formatted ipod with your apple computer, and its copy of itunes. I do it all the time — it has the added advantage of making the ipod useful as an external drive for both Mac’s and PC’s, which, if its HFS (aka MacOS) formatted, is then just limited to Mac’s.

John Boylan's picture
John Boylan on August 11, 2005 - 15:42 Permalink

Billy Joel!!! It’s a terrible thing seeing technology being used for evil.

Ann's picture
Ann on August 11, 2005 - 17:38 Permalink

You beat me to the punchline, John.
I was going to question the use of “rock out” and “Billy Joel” in the same sentence.