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Hacking The iPod: How I Earned $65K In High School
- acoyfellow 14y agoI enjoy the short sweetness of your story. Love your spirit, at such a young age. You sound like the kid I wish I was. What did you do with that money? Blow it on kid stuff, or save it? Use it for anything specific?
- K2h 14y agoagreed, the brevity and concise writing made this a great article. The author obviosly learned something from HS english class, well done. the logical progression from a one off fix, to fixing friends, to dealing with parts shortages (buy bulk damaged units) to warranty repair scavange was awesome.
- afterburner 14y ago"$65,000 in revenue" "My profit margin was not monstrous" So, not sure what the actual profit was, but nice nonetheless.
- JTon 14y agoGood catch. Now I'm a little disappointed
- ted0 14y agoIt was indeed $65,000 in revenue. I hope there wasn't too much confusion there :)
- ewolfe 14y agoI think some terminology might be in order... net income = revenue - expenses So, was your net income $65,000 or was your revenue $65,000?
- nickbarnwell 14y agoI think it's abundantly clear from the article that revenue was $65,000. > "My profit margin was not monstrous but the hard work and the lessons learned were invaluable"
- jarek 14y agoTo say nothing of the front page of HN
- jarek 14y agoYou have a bright future ahead of yourself as a VC-backed tech company CFO.
- D_Alex 14y agoSoooo... How much income did you have from all that?
- afterburner 14y agoThe title says "earned". I believe the confusion would stem from the title.
- hkmurakami 14y agoThe best part of the story to me, is the Apple Attorney who decided to give a slap on the wrist before moving on to the potential legal carpet bomb mission. In the age of organizations such as the RIAA suing teenagers or the elderly without such gestures, it is refreshing to read.
- corin_ 14y agoSounds to me like they gave a slap on the wrist because he had done nothing illegal and therefore all they could do was try to scare him... and it worked. I could be wrong, though.
- ashconnor 14y agoWell usually I'd expect some sort of limit to be buried in some legal document; it sounds like they called to scare him because somebody never wrote that in.
- hkmurakami 14y agoOh I didn't consider this possibility at all (just blindly assumed that this sort of thing would be covered in the fine print).
- dendory 14y agoWe all know the company could have brought up a ton of charges if they didn't like him abusing warranty. I think as a kid, he was smart to agree and walk away with the money he made so far, rather than risk a costly legal battle.
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoI started to buy broken iPods that were still under warranty, mailing them back to Apple and receiving brand new refurbished iPods for the cost of shipping. This was the most lucrative venture of all but it was the primary reason why an Apple lawyer had called me that day. Understandably so, they did not like me taking advantage of their transferrable warranties. They knew that I was a kid and let me off the hook I don't get it. If you were buying units still under warranty and Apple had transferable warranties then I'm not sure what they let you off the hook from. You were not doing anything wrong. It sounds more like just another dick move from Apple.
- J3L2404 14y agoMore like a dick move by him not telling them they could just get a new iPod.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- gcb 14y agohow do you know it was a bad deal? he was paying something for that broken ipod. those people would have to pay shipping and then sell their refurbished ipod, also at a loss since they do not have the volume he had to make a profit from used eletronic sales (last time you were able to sell a used consumer camera at a good price on craigslist?) in the end, the profit for both parties may have been the same.
- fleitz 14y agoIt could also be construed as an arbitrage opportunity vis-a-via the time value of money. Obviously some parties to the transaction might be unaware that their device is still under warranty, but the OP is providing a valuable service allowing them to liquidate their broken iPod into immediate cash and avoiding the risk that the warranty might be void, as well as the delay between sending and receiving the repaired unit. The OP didn't force the people to put their broken iPod on ebay, he's merely taking advantage of an existing offer.
- TamDenholm 14y agoI had a similar little side business in high school putting chips into 1st gen playstations and selling pirated games, then someone i knew who did the same but at a much higher volume got busted and I immediately stopped. The only thing that ever happened to him though was he got his computers seized.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoHow did you go from perfect English in your first sentence to ridiculous abbreviations in your second? ("tht ... tho")?
- TamDenholm 14y agoI'm not the best typist on the iPad, I have corrected my mistakes.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoSorry.
- 286c8cb04bda 14y agoHow do you go from friendly to total dick in so few characters? Is there any possible outcome to your question that would serve any purpose other than to rile the parent poster?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- roel_v 14y agoHah yeah me too, I had games shipped from Asia in 1997 or so, that was so exotic back then that people came over to my house to see what packages from the other side of the world looked like (hint: exactly like the local ones, except maybe with a few more stickers). Then in the later versions of the PS1 the solder points became so small that I needed to solder the chips in with a magnifying glass and a very thin needle-like soldering gun tip, which I accidentally got right a few times and then botched a customer's Playstation with. Whoops. Stopped doing it after that - it was getting repetitive anyway, and profits had always been very low, even before factoring in my time.
- sthulbourn 14y agoThere used to be a sub-telco called Genie in the UK (powered by O2/One2One) when I was in school, they offered unlimited texts on a pre-paid sim card tariff for £10 a month. I used to tell them around my school for £15 per sim card, I learnt a lot about supply and demand... eventually, I became known in my area and started to sell them to students in other schools, this kept me in pocket money for a year before they dissolved the sub-telco. It wasn't much but it was enough to make me understand some principles of business.
- caycep 14y agoeveryone else that did something like this to Apple they eventually hired...could the author have gotten an internship w/ a nice stipend at, say, Apple's hardware design groups to replace his lost activity>
- matt312 14y agoThe author probably could not have gotten an internship with Apple. The one person I heard of Apple hiring like you explain was @comex, who worked on jailbreaks. By hiring @comex, they did 2 things: 1) Put an end to a jailbreaker's work 2) Hired someone to find security holes While this is a pretty neat story, the author probably wouldn't be as valuable for Apple as someone like @comex would be. Here is more information about that hire: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/26/apple-hires-iphone-hacker-nicholas-allegra-comex/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/26/apple-hires-iphone-hacker-n...
- daeken 14y agoFor what it's worth, quite a few of the original iPhone Dev Team members got hired by Apple, and they tried to recruit all of us. Not sure about the later iPhone hackers, but in the early days they were trying hard to get all of us.
- skeptical 14y agoI don't know how many ipods he fixed, but to sum up to $65k, he surely was very busy. If he charged an average of $30 per fix, he would have to fix 2000+ ipods. Where does one get the word out to 2000 owners of broken ipods of a specific generation? I don't envy hum, it doesn't feel like 'easy money' nor 'a good business' to me. Way too much work involved.
- raghavb 14y agoAwesome to hear, did something similar. In 2009 I failed a paper in high school and as a result had to rewrite the paper in 2010. Being into computers and stuff a few of my friends asked me to unlock their iPhones that they had gotten(This is in India and people use to abuse the 200$ iPhone by getting them through relatives in the US). I soon realized there was a market for this sort of thing and started unlocking iPhones as a business by advertising on craigslist. Made about 1100$ which in Indian rupees is about Rs 55000 which is a lot. Helped paid for a lot of my computer gear.
- icebraining 14y agoI started like you, but never made more than a few bucks. I unlocked Nokia phones for a couple of friends and then charged ~$3 to other kids. I probably made less than $100 overall. This was when Nokia phones could be unlocked by simply inputting the IMEI and phone network on a VB calculator and getting the code. I did tell them how it was done, but back then few people had Internet at home or knew how to use it, whereas I spent many Saturday mornings on the public library using their machines and connection.
- rudiger 14y agoRevenue != Earnings
- blantonl 14y agoThe most important part of this story is that he educated himself as a high schooler on the concept of arbitrage. Unfortunately, he succumbed to the concept of leverage.
- horsehead 14y agoYou were making 65 grand whilst still in high school. I was playing final fantasy VII. Not sure which was better ..... actually yes I am. Why the hell didn't i start tinkering with stuff earlier on. Kudos to you, and thanks for writing about it!! Best of luck
- afterburner 14y agotbh I would guess he made something like 10-20k, as in the text he clarifies that 65k was revenue not profit or earnings. Good learning experience though. A full-time summer job would net you... 5k? Multiplied by number of summers. Probably not as fun...
- neilparikh 14y agoAny advice you can give to me on starting a business in high school? This sounds like it would be an interesting and challenging thing to undertake. I'm 16, almost done grade 10. I can program at a okay level, having created a few web apps.
- heretohelp 14y agoIdentify an opportunity, then exploit it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- grabeh 14y agoI'd be interested to read the terms of the warranty. Transferability may have been limited to personal use rather than the bulk warranty claims undertaken by the OP. That's with my lawyer hat on at least. With non-lawyer hat on, nice work OP in servicing a need and creating a business opportunity for yourself.
- megablast 14y agoNice work, I did the same with IBM Thinkpads, with the huge advantage that IBM supplied full hardware manuals, and lots of the parts were interchangeable. I would buy lots of broken laptops on ebay, use the parts, and sell parts that I didn't use back on ebay. Then sell the fully working laptops on craigslist.