Props to Apple
30 November -0001
It snowed, heavily, here in Philadelphia over the last weekend. It was a nasty mix of slush, sleet and snow too. All in all it made conditions pretty gnarly. So I wasn't at all surprised when, while walking around the neighborhood I spotted one of the old style iPod Shuffles stuck in the snow under a thin layer of ice. The white Shuffle was nearly invisible in the snow, and I honestly don't know how I even saw it. What I was surprised by, was that after chipping the device out of the ice (it was buried so well that I couldn't wrench the headphones out of the ice layer they had frozen in) it looked relatively intact. I had to abandon the headphones though. So after taking the device home I figured I had nothing to lose and plugged it into my computer. Lo and behold - it still worked! It must have been buried outside overnight, since that's when the top layer of snow melted and refroze to become ice, in sub zero temperatures. Despite being completely encased in a frozen layer of electronics crushing liquid the device still booted up just fine and functioned. I couldn't believe it. Perhaps there is something to be said for choosing consumer electronics with no moving parts. The iPod Shuffle is a flash based device (much like a USB thumb drive) that adds on a small battery component to provide power while on the go. This was one of the old style Shuffles, with only 256 MB of storage - but I couldn't argue with the price. I posted a notice on Craigslist but haven't heard anything. I also managed to recover a subscriber email out of the DRM from the songs on the device. I have the owner's name (or I assume it's their name - the device is named "Joe Smith's iPod" (not the real name, saving that to verify if anyone calls)) so I can get it back to them, but it's been a while now so I think it's been abandoned. Props to Apple for producing such a sturdy little device - I'm beyond impressed!