Farewell the iPod. Now what?

And so, it’s gone. The iPod.  As noted by the IT:

Apple has discontinued the iPod music player after more than 20 years on the market. The most recent version of the device — the iPod Touch — has not been updated since 2019 and many of its features are now incorporated into other Apple devices and services. Apple said it would continue to sell the Touch, the last remaining generation of the iPod on sale, “while supplies last”.

Here’s an overview from the Guardian.

The iPod was always great. Well greatish. Essential for those of us who downloaded music or ripped CDs. But often with frustrating battery life and too small capacity. I only owned a small number but got my hands on a fair few and my sense of them was that they were flawed but brilliant. Across twenty years I’d have to say the stick like iPod shuffle, which was the first I purchased, with just 512 MBs capacity was oddly great. No screen, just a click wheel and away one went.

There were successors – those like the Nano which added a screen and storage but they seemed interim steps. The first Touch was amazing. The first time I saw one was when a friend had purchased the device. It was as if it had fallen off a flying saucer, with touch screen, apps, etc. Now this was the future I’d been promised back in the 1970s. Capacity though was less amazing. That was all too typical of the way the actual future had developed.

The later Classics were pared back but their flaw was the fact they used a drive rather than SSD for storage and the only one I ever had, although it had 160 GBs of storage, didn’t last more than three years before it had a catastrophic drive failure, which was absurdly short a period of time. That was replaced with a later version iPod Touch which had so so battery life and indifferent storage until recently. Replaced that a year ago with what was clearly the last iteration of the Touch. Now this, for some reason, despite having the same form factor was vastly speedier and better with respect to battery power. And 256 GBs was a sweet spot, in so far as a year or so later I’ve still not quite filled it It’s getting close but so far so good.

So by the above standards given my experience of owning various iterations it should last for, what, up to five or six years, assuming the battery doesn’t go awol. But what then? I guess the only way forward will be to repurpose an old phone. I’m in the Apple ecosphere, I’ve used Android phones with my Mac etc, and they sync okay, not great. And that makes non-Apple MP3 players, however good they are and some are very good indeed, a little bit more of a challenge. There’s an argument, and it is a very good one, that there’s no need for multiple devices that can fulfil similar functions, that they are wasteful of resources and energy. I’ve always liked the idea of a dedicated music player – and in truth they long predate mobile telephony. But… I can see the push towards using an older phone when the current iPod decides it’s played its last.

Any suggestions? And what experience have people had with MP3 players or did the rise of the streaming services simply brush them aside for you.

Meanwhile on RTÉ an interesting point was made that the introduction of the iPod changed the gender profile of music listeners, with women listeners increasing markedly as against the status quo ante when male listeners had predominated, with an impact on what was then popular. Yet I can imagine it to some degree, music shops tended to tilt male, live music – at least rock and adjacent areas too. A truly portable music device – more portable than its spiritual predecessor, the Walkman, would be key to changing that. It’s a really interesting thesis.