Casey Neistat is a 22-year-old multimedia artist who lives in Lower Manhattan, so it almost goes without saying that he’s got an Apple iPod, and that he loves it, because what young, self-respecting multimedia artist in Lower Manhattan doesn’t these days?
But his love was tested when his iPod went cold, and he could not bring it back to life.
Ownership of an iPod digital music player has grown a bit culty, especially when people talk about how it has changed their inner musical lives. This sounds like crazy talk, until you get one, and then you understand, because now you, too, are having an everlasting love affair with something very small. An iPodder has a telltale white cord coming from his coat pocket to his ears and lives in sonic smugness; he walks around in a kind of perpetually happy glaze, with his entire music collection — as many as 10,000 songs — going with him.
Neistat bought his iPod in early 2002, not long after Apple introduced it. He would usually listen to it on his daily bike ride to TriBeCa, where he and his brother, Van, 28, have a small studio and work together on films and other art projects, professionally calling themselves the Neistat Brothers.
In late October — after about 18 months of use — the rechargeable lithium-ion battery in Casey Neistat’s iPod would no longer work.
So he went to Apple’s terribly chic megastore in SoHo and asked to purchase a new battery. He was calm about it, and so were the clerks who dashed his hopes.
“I explained that it wasn’t charging up anymore,” Neistat recalls, “and they said, ‘We don’t offer a new battery. You should just buy a new iPod.'” This offended him on a lot of levels, mostly their assumption that he could simply plunk down several hundred dollars for a new one. Neistat told them he couldn’t afford that. They shrugged him off, and so he went home and called Apple’s technical support number, three times.
This is where the trouble started, and how, a month later, nearly 1 million Internet surfers (and counting) have come to know the Neistat Brothers as the makers of a two-minute, guerrilla-style film about deceit and revenge called “iPod’s Dirty Secret.”
In it, Casey Neistat calls Apple’s tech support, presses 1 and explains his battery problem to someone named Ryan, a minion of the computer company.
Like a doctor with zero bedside manner, Ryan quickly gets to the point: Since Neistat’s iPod is past the yearlong warranty, the cost of parts, labor and shipping will nearly equal the cost of a new machine, and so, Ryan suggests yet again, Neistat should probably just relax and buy a new iPod, which currently costs from $299 to $499, depending on the memory size.
As the voice of Ryan drones coldly on about the iPod’s internal workings, we see the brothers getting busy against the Man. With the rap group NWA’s song Express Yourself as a soundtrack, they make a large poster-board stencil that reads: “iPod’s Unreplaceable Battery Lasts Only 18 Months.”
The Neistats’ funky but wrathful movie () shows Casey merry-pranksterly strolling around Manhattan, spray-painting dozens of Apple’s pretty pastel iPod posters with his warning, which the brothers consider “a public service announcement” to counteract Apple’s current iPod advertising campaign.
(According to Apple there are about 1.4 million iPods in use worldwide.)
Within days, thousands of iPod owners had downloaded the movie and, somewhat horrified at the news, forwarded it around the world.
APPLE RESPONSE
There is something both wonderfully renegade and depressing about “iPod’s Dirty Secret.” It provokes an ambivalent despair in iPod owners, many of whom had not yet considered the mortality of their new little electronic friend.
The Neistat Brothers, who swear by Apple products (the movie ends with a credit to Apple’s iMovie software and the Macintosh computers on which the brothers work), say they feel a little cheated by the company in which they’d placed so much faith.
Days after the movie made the rounds, Apple announced expanded warranties for new iPod owners to purchase for $59, and also introduced a new $99 battery-replacement mail-in service for others.
Casey says he got a phone call in response to a letter of discontent he’d written to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, from still another minion, still advising him to just buy a new one. Days later, another Apple employee called, this time to make sure the brothers knew about the new battery-replacement price. “Are you calling because of our movie?” Casey said he asked. “And the person said he could neither confirm or deny that he’d seen it.”
Apple officially denies that the brothers’ movie had anything to do with the new battery price. Natalie Sequeira, an Apple spokeswoman, says the longer warranty and replacement price have been in the works for a few months.
Sequeira, from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., tries to deflect the idea that Apple would like to sell iPods as a disposable, pricey item that music lovers who get a taste of the iPod Kool-Aid will just have to keep replacing.
What the Neistat Brothers have done to Apple, however, is almost sacrilege to the Mac congregation.
“We got close to 1,000 e-mails the first couple of days,” Casey reports. “A lot of people were in my exact position and had to buy the new iPod. Eighty percent of our mail was positive, people saying that they liked the sardonically irreverent way we did it. But there were die-hard Mac fans who were mad at us, who were panicking because they feel like we might cause somebody to not buy a Macintosh.”
LEARNING CURVE
When you buy an iPod, nothing in the fine print of the owner’s manual prepares you for the eventual, final power drain, or gives you any estimate of how far down the road death awaits. This appears to be less an omission or deceit on Apple’s part and more of a callous assumption: All electronics go to heaven, kids. Apple and other manufacturers are carefully pushing consumers further away from the battery age, when consumers could try to fix broken things, or replace their power sources.
“There’s a whole culture evolving,” says Stan Ng, Apple’s director of worldwide marketing for the iPod. “The iPod is a labor of love for everyone at Apple, but we still don’t really understand just how much of a role it’s playing in people’s lives, how important it’s really become. It’s this emotional, visceral field.”
Ng says everyone is learning together: Apple doesn’t yet know how often consumers will want or can afford to replace their iPods, nor has the product been around long enough for the company to know accurately how long most iPods will last. (It’s commonly thought the battery is good for about 500 full recharges.)
He’s also not entirely sure they’ll avail themselves of the battery-replacement service. The company has not yet made provision for a deluge of 1.4 million returned iPods awaiting service. “There are people who are running into the situation [of the battery dying] and who will use our replacement program,” he says. “But there are also customers who, at that point, could decide, ‘wow, look at those new products, which have new capabilities.'”
This is a notion Sequeira heartily seconds: “We’re just not expecting this to be a big issue.”
