I was traveling in Peru for the past 2 weeks and had my Ipod with me. For some reason when I got into higher altitudes like 8000 to 10000 feet the ipod would not be able to find songs on the hard disk. You could hear the hard disk spining but it would just freeze up sooner later. Once I got up to about 13000 feet in Puno the Ipod just wouldnt boot up at all. Has anyone had any problems with the Ipod at high altitudes? The Ipod works fine now back at home. And it worked fine the second the plane took off once the cabin pressurized. By the way I have the 60gb Ipod photo, and I also brought a sony vaio laptop with me that worked perfectly fine the whole time.

Environmental requirements

* Operating temperature: 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C)
* Non operating temperature: -4° to 113° F (-20° to 45° C)
* Relative humidity: 5% to 95% non-condensing
* Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)

on the apple site

well i was up 36,000 feet in a plan and it worked....maybe because i was in a different environment

I guess that sucks for people that live in Peru and Bolivia or anywhere else that is 10,000 feet

or you could get the iPod shuffle....i think it only affects the HDD, so maybe alot of HDD based mp3 players wont work over 10,000 feet

Thats odd because my intel based laptop works fine at over 10k feet. I use it all the time while traveling. Sorry if it seems off-topic.

This is what I got from another forum

This is from the IBM support site:

The Microdrive does need "AIR" to float the heads and typically above 10,000 ft the mass of the air is too low and the drive requires a pressurized environment similar to an aircraft or spacecraft. At high altitude the air bearings begin to loose support from the air molecules needed to provide the "air bearing" for the Negative Air Bearing Surface (NABS) design of the head. If this "air bearing" is removed or lowered (as is the case with low density air at high altitudes) the head damages the media and you could have loss of data. The drive is vented to maintain equal pressure inside and outside to provide the air and to maintain the same pressure. This eliminates the need for sealed and rigid covers that can tolerate pressure differences.
The OEM Functional specification defines the warranty range for operating altitude as 3,000 M or 9,000 ft (3ft/M). If the customer is mountain climbing with a GPS or digital camera above 9,000 ft the drive might have problems. (Mt Fuji ~ +13,000ft, Mt Raineer ~ +14,000 ft). Please note, this is the operating environment. Non operation at high altitudes, including vacuum, have no ill effects on the microdrive. Within passenger aircraft, the cabin is pressurized to 9-10,000 feet hence the drive would experience no difficulty operating in an aircraft cruising at 35-45,000 ft !