I had to take Mr. Bsag's birthday iPod shuffle back to the Apple Store yesterday, because it had developed a fault. I'm still not sure exactly what the problem was, but it seemed as if there was a failed contact somewhere, because it would either suddenly lose power when it had been fully charged, or the buttons would only intermittently respond to presses. I hadn't realised that returns need to be handled by the Genius Bar, so I had to make an appointment and wait.

Given that the fault is a bit intermittent, I worried that the shuffle would obey Sod's Law and work flawlessly as soon as it passed into the hands of the genius. It did work for most of the time, but he could see what the problem was, and to his credit he swapped it out for a new unit without any fuss.

While I was waiting, I had a bit of a play with the new iPod nano^1^. It's really a thing of beauty, but I think that I'd worry too much about scratching or denting it to enjoy it. In fact, the previous client of my genius was showing him a nano with a definite bend in it. It was quite impressive. My guess is that the owner had put it in the back pocket of his/her jeans, and then sat down hard on a brick wall. Ouch.

^1^ I think it speaks volumes about the kind of contamination that partners of Apple geeks can suffer that almost the first piece of news that Mr. Bsag gave me when I got back from Brazil (after asking me how I was, of course) was about the nano.↑