The only reason I stopped using my iPod was because I lost it. 🥲
It was my companion for many many years, I think I lost it in 2016 or something. I recently started considering getting another one, but I honestly wouldn't like having to install iTunes just for it.
There are a lot of non-Apple options for a very similar experience. I have a Fiio X1 Gen 2 that I like. They're not widely available new anymore but they are still about the same price as when I got it.
You don’t need iTunes to manage an iPod. There are tons of alternative apps, as well as plugins for music players like foobar2000 and Winamp.
iPods are still great. You can even replace their hard drives with modern flash storage and they work. It’s actually really impressive, i built a 256GB iPod Mini and iTunes has no problem with it. For the Mini, any compact flash card works as a drop-in replacement for the hard drive. Other models require a cheap adapter.
I completely forgot about that! I used foobar2000 a lot back in the day, but never managed how to manage my iPod through it, it was just my main music player.
Is there a market for modified iPods? I'd love to get one already modified with the flash storage you mentioned
Why did I just read an article about using an iPod that was clearly written by someone born in the early-mid 2000s? I know the original ipod was fun. I was there, gandalf
I've never understood it, but there's a lot of gatekeeping when it comes to older products. Some people think they have more rights to enjoy a product they knew existed for longer and it's really strange behaviour.
I see a lot of younger people wondering why so many people my age liked this or that and it helps to have it in context. Like "what's so great about half life? Every shooter ever is like that!" Ah, but you see, my young friend, that's now. Everything is like Half Life because Half Life changed the landscape. Not really gatekeeping, but you do lose a lot of what made a thing special if you're only looking at it without the historical context.
Why do people get frustrated about that? Someone is experiencing something for the first time, it's the circle of life.
I'm in my mid 30s and my wife bought a record player during the revival of records last decade. Do you think older generations than me found that frustrating? Personally I think it's fascinating to watch technology go full circle generation by generation
Interesting discussion to have witnessed as an outsider.
Is an article written for a a writers expression or a readers enjoyment. (Both?)
I dont think they where frustrated with the writers enjoyment but rather disappointed that the article was a first discovery opinion rather then a veterans rediscovery from a modern point of view which would have been more useful to reflect their own opinion and thus be more personally entertaining. The negativity goed inwards perceiving it as a waste of their time.
Great analysis, you're got it spot on there. It's frustration from learning nothing new from something they thought would be interesting. That probably all boils down to bad the title of the article not being descriptive enough.
To be fair, the 2600 is 47 years old, you'd have to be 52 at a minimum to remember it launching and 42 to remember the NES. I just remember loving my Atari 2600 all the way in the 90s.
I'm 42. I always got systems later than other kids. The Atari was in the house ever since I could form memories, and I finally got an NES in 1990, when the SNES and Genesis/Mega drive were on the horizon.
Then the Atari was already very old by the time you started forming memories, so it would have been your parent's generation. It was 4 years old when you were born.
Naw, no hate. iPods are fuckin rad. Younger generations should definitely get to enjoy older tech. But the author’s observations weren’t really anything I needed to invest my time in reading. I know old iTunes had a visualizer. I don’t know why I read the whole thing anyways
So we can laugh at the fact that they can't find a simple 1394 to USB cable and instead rely on daisy chaining a hundred dollars worth of apple products to make it work...
I didn't buy those adapters, I just used a computer that had a FireWire 400 port. I haven't found any evidence of those direct USB cables working with old iPods.
I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It's business model is disgusting and extortionate, it's like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.
He made a thousand dollar donation in support of proposition 8, a constitutional amendment in California that strips gay people of the right to marry. He then proceeded to argue that such a donation does not make him a bigot or an enemy of LGBTQ+ people, because he's a delusional piece of filth.
This effectively prevented gay people from marrying in California from 2008 to 2013 until the fascists that supported it were finally done trying to argue how this doesn't violate the US constitution.
So yeah, may he, his browser, and any pathethic excuse that pretends to be human being who supported this abomination rot in the deepest depths forever.
The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they're literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it "Basic Attent Tokens"..
TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you'll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.
ITT: People who just read the headlines and not the article, and then going off on their own Windows rant/Linux evangelism instead of discussing the article.
I read the article! It suggests in a hundred different ways that Windows 11 sucks and that sticking it out with Windows 10 is a bad idea for a dozen different reasons.
The people here suggesting Linux nailed it. If you're not using Linux at this point you're just being lazy, IMHO. If you have any issues you can always just troubleshoot and fix it but based on the anecdotes posted so far it's obvious no one claiming to have tried Linux has done much of that.
Get off your ass and learn something new for real or stop bitching and bend over for Microsoft with your wallet ready to pay them afterwards for the privilege.
People bitching about Windows on their personal PCs is like people who don't vote bitching about politics.
If you’re not using Linux at this point you’re just being lazy
I used Linux for over twenty years and stopped about two years ago due to Linux invariably moving to lazy, poor development and design all the way from the kernel up. Rapid kernel development with tons of random new patches and ideas instead of the old way of maintaining a stable kernel and doing random patches and ideas on a separate branch (the odd minor versions vs. the stable even ones, and even the modern "stable" kernels are just the same branch of constantly rapid updated kernels where they just choose one at random and say "this is 'stable' now and we'll keep patching it instead of telling people to install new ones"), systemd being more of a problem than a solution, the push for everything to move to Wayland forcing every single thing that has to do with lower level desktop interfaces, including all of the lightweight window managers, to completely rewrite themselves with tons of bloat that replaces everything X.org did by default as well as Wayland's devs taking a "it works on my computer" approach to bugs and dismissing tons of major issues people have found, pipewire still not being a stable, reliable audio system (Linux has never had one, but using ALSA with the right hardware back in the day where everything would mix via hardware was a decent solution), distros becoming more and more unreliable and buggy (even "stable" and "long term support" ones), distros and developers giving up on native and running bare metal applications and substituting things like flatpak to run things natively with any sort of cross-platform reliability and fucking wine -- essentially a new version of Windows running in Linux, which is an admission of failure to make a successful game platform if I've ever heard one -- to run games, and on and on.
I've been able to use Linux very well until a few years back. I used to be one of its biggest advocates and wouldn't dare run Windows.
No more. People bitch, moan, and complain about Windows 11 so much but for me, it just works. Simply, easily, no problem. Do I wish I still used Linux? Hell, yes. But am I given how bad it's become? Nope. I've even tried going back here and there and quickly ran into the same huge list of problems and aches that were never there before and back to Windows I go.
Sorry, Linux is a pain and it's not about being lazy, it's about wanting to use a decent OS that just works as well as Linux used to.
I’ve been using Linux since 2008, and yours and my experience is basically opposite. I stayed on X until about a year ago, and haven’t had any problems with Wayland. PipeWire was basically immediately better as soon as Fedora switched to it. I could use Jack plugins and patch bays with my pulse apps, including all the electron apps, like Discord. Systemd has always been better than sys5 init. Maybe you don’t remember how bad the old init daemon was.
I remember the old initd. It was fast, efficient, didn't hang up for 10+ minutes when it got confused about what needed to shut down when, and just worked until a bunch of impatient new Linux users wanted to get to the desktop in 0.00007 seconds and couldn't patiently wait for a proper init boot order so they created this bloated monstrosity. But those aren't even the worst part of NuLinux: to this day Wayland is absolute unstable garbage not worth using. Visual glitches, UI glitches, instability, slowdowns, and outright crashes that even REISUB can't recover from. Meanwhile, Xorg still Just Works.
Modern Linux is garbage and needs to be either fixed or thrown away.
If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.
Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode.... Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019
Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.
I don't disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author's key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn't investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn't too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve's attention. So who is being "anti-consumer" in this example, Valve or Apple?
It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn't want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.
Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.
It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-bit libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.
That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.
The issue is keeping them working. My wife has iPods (gen 3?). We've backed Tangara in the hope that it will replicate the experience and let us finally replace them. It's surprisingly difficult (read: impossible) to get something that plays music, has a wakeup alarm, and has a sleep timer.
For me it’s also about reducing my reliance on my mobile. Teaching my kids by example that life isn’t only on my phone is easier when I can more clearly demonstrate what I’m doing. To listen to music I get my music device. When I want to take pictures, I grab my camera.
Basically this, for me. I want my devices to be more dedicated to a singular purpose, so I'm not tethered to my phone all day. Having a camera, an MP3 player, and a handheld makes my actions feel more purposeful. Building off that, having a "one-stop-shop" type of device or service or anything really imo makes the overall experience worse. Think Wal-mart versus a dedicated electronics store or something.
I’ve been using a gen 5.5 for about 10 months and am quite enjoying it. I bought a refurb with a fresh battery and SD card replacement. Sounds great, nostalgia moments on point, and can enjoy music without my phone.
On Linux it’s been a bit cumbersome to get content on, and the podcast experience is subpar by modern expectations, but I still appreciate the tactile interface. It’s nice to interact with things that aren’t all glass touch surfaces.
Put Rockbox on it and drag and drop any audio file onto the iPod like you would any removable media. You can also play flac, ogg, and many other formats not supported by the og OS.
I had considered this. I still may at some point. I wanted to play with the original interface and experience that. Plus my car connects well to iPods (it’s an older car) and that’s pretty handy. I’m pretty sure it’ll get the audio from rockbox but less confident playlists and such will work.
Rockbox has pretty great playlist support. You can use m3u playlist you generate and drag those over or rockbox can create them. The original iPod interface is much nicer. Rockbox can be a bit cumbersome but you can find some nice themes to pretty faithfully recreate the look and feel.
I really want an mp3 player right now - my last one broke and I don't want to carry a phone instead. But it seems like they're either ultra-cheap, overpriced or don't have features I need (like Bluetooth). It is so sad that the midrange audio players pretty much disappeared now. So instead looking as DIY projects, cannot believe.
The original ipod looks very cool btw, even if I would never use one myself - way too large.
Why necessarily "used"? Also I have this exact thing already. I just wanted a device that has no cell connectivity option and thus no tracking, and also (maybe even more importantly) - is smaller and lighter. Going for sports with a phone is inconvenient af.
I am using a Hifi Walker H2. It is a reasonable price, has bluetooth and no capacitive touch inputs. The UI is not great but the device is physically solid and works for me.
I pre-ordered a Tangara on their crowd funding. I am hopeful about the opensource hardware and software. Only reservation is capacitive touch scroll wheel.
They don’t call them “mp3 players” anymore - that may be why you can’t find what you need. Look for a “DAP” instead - digital audio player - and you’ll probably have more luck.
For example, the Fiio M7 is $200 and is pretty full-featured. I have the M6 and I think I paid around $100, but I don’t think it’s being sold anymore.
What I looked for were product categories. Ye, seen these models. $200 is very, very expensive for me, it would be weird to spend on a player more than you would on a phone.
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