My ipod touch finally died on me. I’m not too sad about it, considering my dropping it repeatedly onto pavement at 20+ mph while cycling, getting frozen in my car innumerable times over two winters, and getting butter inside of it somehow. In no way do I complain against apple’s manufacturing standards. On the contrary, this device stood the test of time and I immediately bought another one.
I first opened the cast by inserting a small electronic flathead screwdriver between the black front casing and (direly in need of polishing) polished rear casing and prying. Careful here, I broke two screwdrivers and marred up the ipod doing this. The tutorial I was following suggested a metal ‘spudge’ which I don’t have.
See Tutorial Here

Once opened,I found the lithium ion battery on the back taking up 40% of the interior (in two dimensions at least; it is the silver square in the image at right). The battery is really just a flexible metal bag which I found interesting; surely to save weight and space.
On the inside of the back cover is a stamped number and handwritten in sharpy, ‘2-2.’ I wonder how old the person who wrote that on there is.
One will also notice above the battery the metal plate. Underneath here is where the majic is.

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further
investigations

Intermediate step. Here you can see the cables running through underneath the battery. Each cable looks like flat tape, and has maybe 20 connections or so per. Pay special attention to the lithium ion battery (far left in the image) that has a thin flexible Al enclosure. This must give easier tolerances when constructing the Ipod as the battery will flex to fill gaps. It also would reduce weight. One might also notice a 2-d UPC label on the metal plate at the top which is a cool emerging technology, but I don’t see any real need for them in the market-place as 1-d UPC seems to give a large enough variety of numbers to uniquely identify the objects for sale. Not that I know diddly about UPC.

Underneath the metal cover plate lies the apple brain (left) along with two 4Gb flash cards (center, right). You will find a better resolution of the 2-d UPC code in this image link. Behind the brain is shown at right. Further disassembly (below) shows the touch screen with butter behind. The screen is translucent oddly enough.

…Evolution…

Pardon the blur, I couldn’t give up the cat.