Have a Fourth Generation iPod? Is it dead? The first ones shipped almost a year and a half ago, so chances are it might be. Sad iPod, faint clicking noise? Turns out, the problem may not be with the hard drive after all. You might recall my little bit of fun with my 4th Gen iPod and its fun little trip off my balcony to test out the iFrogz case. For those too lazy to click the link, the gist is that my iPod was already dead from Ye Old Click O' Death, so I decided to give the iFrogz a rigorous drop test... twice, from three floors up. What I hadn't counted on was that the darned thing would start working again following the drops.

Come again? Three story drop and it fixed it? You read it here, and you heard it right. To be fair, it now only works for about an hour before the click of death returns, and the iPod must be reset to work again. But that's progress, eh?

So I got to thinking about what could possibly have been wrong, such that it would have failed, but a drop would have fixed it. I came up with two possible scenarios.

Mac Geekery