Macbook Pro and iPod Touch 1g

Question

Hello there Apple,
I am quite satisfied with how the Macbook Pro works and it's compatibility with other Apple products, but recently I have been having some problems regarding my iPod touch. Now I know that this seems to be a problem, that should be posted in the dedicated iPod touch forum, but in my opinion this problem seems to lie with the Macbook Pro, I will explain this later on.
It all started when my iPod touch did not show up in my iTunes source list. I have had no recent problems of this sort and I can assure you that my iPod has not suffered any recent hardware damage. Now I started looking for solutions in the internet and stumbled on the fact, that this seems to be a normal problem. I went through all the steps showed on the Apple site: I updated my latest firmware, newest version of iTunes, I changed the cable and USB ports, but nothing seemed to work. So as a last resort, I decided to put my iPod into restore mode. At this point I would like to add, that my iPod was working fine, my music was playing and all my apps still worked, it just did not show up in iTunes. So now my iPod was in restore mode (which of course you can't exit). I plugged it in and it showed up in iTunes, (this is when I started to celebrate), HOWEVER an error occurred, which said that my iPod could not be restored (Error 1611). I of course looked this up in the internet again and found that many other people had this problem as well and yet there seemed to be no solution to this problem, besides sending it to Apple, paying the mail fee, only to have it sent back and still having the same problem.
Naturally I thought I'll just plug it into my PC and see what happens. As it turns out, I was able to restore my iPod on the PC and even put music on it. Now I took the iPod, plugged it back into my Macbook and what happens? It does not show up in iTunes. It seems to me that there is a better compatibility of my iPod touch with a PC, than with a MacIntosh.
Is there any solution to my problem?
Also, I would like to add that I find it very inconvenient, that there is no large cross-platform harddrive as this causes me a lot of problems.
Another thing that keeps happening with my Macbook is that it keeps disconnecting from my Home network, yet all other devices have no problem with this.
Apple, can you please help me with my problems?

Answer 1

I took the MacBook Pro into my Apple Store, and the Genius at the Genius Bar was totally at a loss to figure out why this was happening. I believe he tried booting off of a hard drive into Tiger, using an external drive with a Y-cable, using a powered hard drive (which was recognized), formatting my hard drive with another computer and attempting to mount it again on my computer, nothing worked!
So, he asked me to boot into Windows, and I showed him the exclamation mark in the Device Manager. I got an answer to my question that I posed above: Mac does not alter the hardware to the point that another Operating System is affected. So, with this one fact, he had the computer listed for repair, and now I am without the computer for about a week while they order the part, start the repair, then call me to pick it up.
So, the morale of the story is: do not use cheap hubs (that are not UL-listed), and BUY APPLECARE! The cost of a new logic board is about $1099.95, so AppleCare has paid for itself!
Basically, if you are having my problem, just get over yourself, and go to the Genius Bar. I kept telling myself, "if I keep researching it on Google, hopefully there will be an easy fix..." But there is not, just go and save yourself the agony. I'll check back when I get the Mac fixed.