iLounge

Dave Shroeder has emailed us in his own words about the events that took place between the Neistat brothers and himself. Click ‘Read more’ to read the letter.

According to Dave Shroeder, the Neistat brothers (producers of the iPod’s Dirty Secret movie) had no intent on letting people know that there were solutions available for replacing the battery in iPods. Dave had provided the Neistat brothers with a mirror (server space) for their website, ipodsdirtysecret.com, to host their now infamous movie. Dave did this with one condition, that they place a link to Apple’s iPod Battery Service along with the movie. At first the Neistat brothers agreed, but then never posted a link to Apple’s website. Dave has since removed the mirror to the website and has posted a text file containing the email conversations that took place between Dave and Casey Neistat. Dave told us, “Please spread the word on these brothers who’d rather spread lies than the truth.”

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Letter to iLounge from Dave Shroeder.

I offered to mirror their video after their original webhost apparently pulled out, with one condition: that they link to, or otherwise inform users about, Apple’s official $99 iPod battery replacement, since the video, as it stands, is incorrect: the iPod’s battery is replaceable, and, on top of it, there’s an official Apple program for $99.

They agreed to provide this information, and said they had no problem telling users how to solve the problem. I, in turn, provided webspace and bandwidth for them. The bottom line: after two days of lies and false starts, and milking my institution’s generosity by providing almost 100,000 downloads and 0.7 terabytes of data transfer, they NEVER posted any information about how to solve the problem that they promised to post. Their agenda seems clear, and that’s sensationalism, melodrama, and attention.

Before the mirror offer, I sent them two email messages indicating that there is now an official Apple battery replacement program, not to mention third party options, and that it would seem that if their purpose is to bring this to light, they should at least inform people of the solution as well…neither received a response. The first response was to my offer to mirror, and they just lied and stole the whole time, even netting another web provider over 50,000 ad views using OUR bandwidth. Nice.

- Dave