It’s time to bring back the iPod
1000 songs in your pocket
I’ve been nostalgic for my iPod recently—specifically, my very first iPod, an iPod video, a sleek little device that could fit in the palm of my hand and play thousands of songs (and one episode of LOST I bought on iTunes).
I recently purchased a beat-up old iPod video on eBay. Cosmetically, it’s in rough shape, and the battery is completely shot. That’s fine with me: I want to crack it open and replace the battery, swap the spinning hard drive for flash storage, and since I’m opening it up anyway, I might as well replace the face plate.
It’s interesting to hold an iPod in my hands again. Almost twenty years on from my first iPod, I’d forgotten just how small this music player is. My iPhone feels like a behemoth next to it—and these were the biggest, chunkiest iPods! I bought an old 3rd generation iPod nano as well (mostly for shits and giggles—they are notoriously difficult to fix) and it feels impossibly small and thin.
If I can get the iPod video working, it’ll be a fast and focused device dedicated to music listening. It won’t connect to the internet—I’ll have to load actual music files onto the thing. Instead of a touch screen, it’ll have a click wheel, a genuine marvel of one-thumbed user input, and it’ll have an honest-to-god headphone jack, something Apple sacrificed long ago on the iPhone line.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone back in 2007, he started by announcing “three revolutionary products”: “a widescreen iPod with touch controls” (loud cheers from the audience here), “a revolutionary mobile phone” (a proper roar from the crowd), and “a breakthrough Internet communications device” (muted applause, rightfully so). Jobs repeats this all a few more times. “An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator… Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices!”
What we’re coming to realize over a decade later is that maybe they should be! With the launch of the App Store a year later, the iPhone became the Überdevice, a million functionalities rolled into one perfect rectangle. It’s a camera, a GPS navigator, your wallet, a Game Boy, and a health tracker. It’s got your work email and text chains with your Hinge dates, Slack and fantasy football. Picking up your phone is like falling in quicksand—it sucks you in and doesn’t let go.
I’m not a radical digital minimalist by any means—you won’t catch me trading my iPhone for a “dumbphone” anytime soon. And for me, reducing phone usage has as much to do with using good products as it does with cutting out distractions. It’s more comfortable to read digital books on a Kindle, Fujifilm makes better cameras, and no one does handheld gaming like Nintendo. I believe I’ll enjoy listening to music more from an iPod, even if it is all the same bytes and bits at the end of the day.
Of course, music distribution has changed considerably in the last fifteen years, and the proliferation of streaming services makes a traditional files-based music player essentially worthless to your average consumer today. The act of curating a digital music library is mostly left to DJs and nerds, and the audio players available on the market today reflect that. They’re geared towards the audiophile niche and are often prohibitively expensive—even “affordable” picks from Sony or FIIO can run into the many hundreds of pounds.
Weirdly enough, it’s cheaper to buy an old iPod and replacement parts than it is to buy some of these new devices. You won’t get all the niceties of a modern product—iPods still have that old 30-pin connector, a proprietary port that nothing uses anymore, and while I love wired headphones, Bluetooth would be convenient on occasion. But no audio player on the market today has the click wheel beat.
Here’s a pipe dream: what if Apple—and to be clear, they will absolutely never do this—released a new iPod today, an anniversary product? Make it thin as hell, throw in USB-C, and let me connect my AirPods. Maybe there’s an optional Apple Music integration so you can still get the benefits of a streaming library but with a more focused UI. It’s a child’s dream, I’ll admit. But I still dream it.
