I just purchases an 8 Gig Nano (4th Generation), and when I dock it with my Ipod HiFi a screen pops up and says that the device does not support charging. What? Thats lame!!! It still plays and can be controlled with my remote, but it wont charge. You would think that they are both APPLE products that they would work TOGETHER. PLEASE FIX THIS
What makes the discontinuation of firewire charging different from the discontinuation of firewire syncing, is that Apple was by far the dominant provider of the host for firewire syncing, i.e. older macintoshes. I doubt there were many folks who synced their ipods to windows machines over firewire. I'm sure the macintosh group within apple was aware of the discontinuation of firewire syncing on the ipod and v.v. long in advance.
By comparison, MANY various vendors of ipod accessories supported the firewire syncing, for a lot of good reasons, such as a native available 12V power source in automobiles for example. It is much simpler to just run an available 12V (or 9V) source into the firewire charging pin, that to regulate that source down to 5V so you can charge through the USB pin. So to discontinue this unregulated firewire charging function is to make the ipod much less versatile in where it can be used and charged. Syncing is done much less frequently and in much less diverse environments than charging. I think making ipod charging less flexible is a mistake on Apples part.
Finally there is the question of investment. Many ipod "accessories" cost much more that the ipod itself, are relatively difficult to modify, and have a longer life span than your typical electronic widget. Custom designed ipod adapters for car audio are probably the most critical example. It is typical to have the cost of the relatively simple adapter that allows you to connect your ipod to your car stereo to exceed the cost of the ipod itself. To have that expensive cable obsoleted is very frustrating. BOSE Soundock owners: I feel your pain!
My son just bought a new ipod nano 4th gen and found that it would not charge on his Altec Lansing inMotion IMMINI speaker system, which runs off of a 9V wall transformer. Fortunately, the IMMINI has a "pass through docking connector", so he was able to connect a USB charger to the IMMINI using the standard USB-ipod dock cable, and get the ipod to charge. Not sure how many ipod docking type speaker systems have such a pass through dock connector, but this workaround should work for any that do. The purpose of the pass through docking connector is so that you can connect your ipod to the computer for syncing while you are in the dock. It is a bit hard to tell from the Altec Lansing documentation, but it looks like this pass through dock connector is present on most of Altec Lansings inMotion speaker systems. Maybe it is also present on others as well.
They had to be running at least 12V as the FW charging spec does not support 9V.
There was no "long in advance" for the Mac world, when the 5th Generation and Nano were introduced FW syncing ceased.
There are adaptors available that work with car systems and as I've said before adapters are now available that work with some car systems. More will probably make an appearance.
You are late to this party and it has largely been discussed to death.
I just bought the 4th Generation nano and have run into the same problem where it won't charge using my wall charger and the usb cable included with the nano, yet this wall charger charges my old ipod classic.
I wanted to try the itouch but when I realized it wouldn't charge with my "less then a year old" Bose docking station, I took it back and was told I wouldn't have this problem with the nano.
Someone at Apple needs to inform their sales people that there is an issue with charging the 4th generation nano on some devices.
Well since I really like the size of the nano and since I learned there were devices that would fix the charge problem, I kept it and ordered the Griffin converter, FireWire to usb. It was less then $30 from Amazon.
This converter works great with my Bose docking station, my Altec Lansing docking station, and my car charger, but it won't work with the wall charger so there's definitely something different there.
I'm off to Best Buy to see if they actually sell a wall charger that will charge my 4th Generation Nano.
I was really hoping that Griffin adapter was going to solve all my charging problems.
