Old iPod, New Battery
I changed the batteries in my Zunes when I got them in 2020. Both of them went spicy after 2 years of use so I've been hesitant to change the battery in my iPod classic. I don't just mean a little puffy and hot, but like, I plugged one of them in to charge and it instantly busted off the front plate and swelled up half an inch thick. I never ran something outside so fast in my life.
But I had charged up the iPod I bought a few years ago and sure enough, the original battery couldn't hold a charge for more than an hour. I went ahead and ordered a replacement for it and watched the videos on how to change it. iPod batteries are way easier to replace than the Zune ones. In the Zune battery had 4 wires that had to be soldered out to remove it.
I think the reason they went spicy was because the replacement batteries were new old stock. The Zune has a specific size and cabling structure so it was harder to find a replacement in the first place.
Anyway, the iPod battery is brand new and thankfully is only attached with a bit of glue and a ribbon cable. Yes, ribbon cables are scary to unplug/remove during a teardown but these are pretty stiff and harder to rip than say, the ones in a MacBook Air LCD. :D
So the new battery arrived with a few blue plastic spudgers that I instantly ruined trying to pry off the face plate. I used the metal shim tools in my ifixit tool kit. Note: The iPod I have is a 5th gen (5.5) 30gig classic, the one with the good audio internals. The face plate is made of a semi flexible plastic which is much easier to remove than the later 6th and 7th gens which were all metal.
With the face plate off, I popped out two ribbon cables, swapped the battery, reseated the cables and did a power test. NEVER CLOSE SOMETHING UP TILL YOU TEST IT. I charged the battery up to full and synced some podcasts to it from my PC. I am happy to report that it did not get hot during charging and it has held the same charge while being unused for 5 days.
Here's hoping the battery stays good. :)
Now I just need to find my Porta Pro's. I had a really long winded blog post years ago about the advantages of using a proprietary music player as opposed to your phone. The main one being that it's offline and gets no notifications or calls to interrupt your music. The other was that you have to buy the mp3's from artists either on Bandcamp or from a webstore which gives them more money than streaming. I'll see if I can't find it and repost it here later. EDIT: FOUND IT.