Back in 2004, my mother bought me and my brother iPods Mini. Personal audio had always been kind of a thing for me: I went through Walkmans, Discmans, MP3 Discmans, Minidisc and even, for a while, a 64 megabyte Creative MuVo. Pick an album for the day, load it on the MuVo and have it on repeat. Finally getting an iPod was a game-changer.
But this isn’t about nostalgia. Or I should say, not just about nostalgia.
Like so many of us, I got an iPhone and put the iPod in its sock one last time and closed the junk drawer. Almost seventeen years later, the battery won’t hold a charge and its six gigabytes of storage don’t feel as impressive anymore.
Despite that, I’ve recently felt drawn to it more and more. Sure, in part because I’m rapidly approaching 40 and desperately clinging to things from my youth but there’s more to it. A lot more.
I’m trying not to be insufferable about it but I’ve been pursuing mindfulness over the past couple of months. Doing a course, meditating, everything. Most people who’ve done this seem unable to shut up about it, and I’m no exception. It’s taught me a lot about myself and about the human mind but I’m not going to bore you with that.
Listening to music isn’t meditation, or at least not in the opinion of my instructor and I suspect most practitioners would agree with her. To me, it does at least feel like a mindful experience to take the time to really listen to some music. Not in the car or doing chores but having the music be the primary activity.
In the iPhone era, I somehow lost that habbit. Music became background for me. But music is too beautiful an invention to be wasted as just a tool to drown out the noise of an open plan office. It wasn’t an old battery-starved iPod Mini calling to me from inside the junk drawer, it was music itself.
So I bought another iPod. An iPod Classic of the last generation, with an amazing 160 gigabytes of storage. And I’ve been taking the time to sit down with some quality in-ear monitors and just enjoy the music. And it’s been great.
Just like CDs are just objectively better than vinyl records, the iPhone with its access to entire streaming catalogs in lossless quality and modern comforts like Bluetooth is just objectively better than an iPod not fundamentally changed since its debut in 2001. But just as the resurgence of vinyl isn’t about things you can objectively quantify, my rekindled love for the iPod isn’t about that either.
My phone is a source of stress for me, as it is for many. When I’m running late for an important meeting at work, it beeps to tell me so. When my boss calls me, it rings or buzzes. When the UK government decides to be even more transphobic, I read about it on Mastodon in Ivory, on my phone. Not to mention the emails. So many emails.
It’s no wonder millennials are buying vinyl records. It’s no wonder Gen Z are buying up old digital cameras on eBay to be “in the moment”. Being connected to the online world has brought us many tremendous things and I value it greatly. But there’s something to be said for regularly making a conscious decision to unplug and experience something like music, photography or just your own thoughts.
But of course, I couldn’t just end it there. I found YouTube is full of people re-discovering the iPod. And many of them customize theirs with third-party replacement shells in fun colors. And with new higher-capacity batteries, ridiculous amounts of flash storage and bluetooth modules.
This proved to be irresistible to me. So I bought another iPod, one in significantly worse shape. And a purple casing, new battery, sd-card adapter and some other replacement parts like a new display. I’ve come to call it my iPod Pro Max and it’s amazing what these old devices can still do.
With this becoming increasingly popular, prices of used and even beaten up old iPods have skyrocketed. There’s clearly a market, which does beg the question: where’s Apple? The iPod Classic was discontinued in 2014, a decade ago. The iPod Touch, the last to carry the name, said its goodbyes in 2022.
During this journey I also briefly tried an iPod Touch. This was a big mistake. I had to manually remove all the things that remind me of stressful things and distractions like the Calendar app and Messages which all come by default.
Not to mention when someone calls me, through the magic of FaceTime and Handoff (both enabled by default) the iPod also does the dreaded fade-out of music followed by the default ringtone. The exact opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish.
Canceling the iPod Touch was the right call. Leaving the market entirely? Perhaps not so much. Unlike printers and wifi routers, there’s magic in the relationship Apple as a company has with music. I think it’s safe to say it saved them and they saved it.
I just can’t help but wonder what Apple could do with the philosophy behind the iPod and all the technological progress its made since the last real iPods were developed. A device specifically focused on the best possible experience of listening to music.
With the ability to wirelessly sync songs from Apple Music from your phone to the device. With an amazing UX beyond the limitations of a clickwheel and with more personality than just a touch-sensitive slate of glass. And all of this with ridiculous battery life thanks to the efficiency of its Apple Silicon S9 SoC.
I don’t know what such a device would look like but I bet you it would be good. Unfortunately, present-day Apple is not interested in niche-products like that. Many pundits on the Apple beat would insist Apple as a trillion dollar company simply can’t do smaller quirkier things anymore - as if it’s a law of nature.
We know that’s not true. Sony does it to a ridiculous degree. They even make portable music players. They call them Walkmans, like they always have.
But until Apple starts valuing the iPod the way Sony still values the Walkman, my purple flash-based iPod Classic Pro Max will have to do. And I will enjoy every second of it.