I’ve been REALLY getting into older tech lately and I thought it’d be fun to do a nerdy little show-and-tell in blog post format on my latest obsession; the classic iPod! Let me take you on a journey of acquiring this relic of the past. You’re all going to get pulled down this rabbit hole with me today. Buckle up!
I’ve been wanting to get away from the subscription service model for entertainment and going back to things from my youth has been such a breath of fresh air. The 90’s and early 2000’s had it good on the tech front!
Let’s go back to the beginning.
My exploration first started with getting back into physical media a couple of years ago. It started with DVDs, and expanded to music when I happened to stumble across an autographed CD from one of my favorite bands of my youth, Hawk Nelson, at a local thrift store. That day was magical! I picked up the CD and when I popped it in my PC to listen to it, it felt like a time capsule. There’s just such a different feeling with holding something physical, something tangible in your hands and knowing that you own it – not renting it – but truly own it. You can play it as many times as you want, and only have to pay for it once!
I got myself a little boom box and now I use it all the time when I’m at home, playing a now larger collection of CD’s hubby and I have amassed during our thrift store adventures. CD’s are dirt cheap secondhand, now every thrift store adventure feels like a treasure hunt for all of our nostalgia!
Additionally, we got a portable CD player, which is useful for the car, but, I wanted something a little bit more portable. Something I could easily fit in my pocket while out walking and the portable CD player was just a bit too bulky for comfort (no shade if you still enjoy using the old CD walkmans). So I started considering my options, wanting to go back to an MP3 player of sorts. While music on MP3 players is quite a bit less tangible, MP3 players still hold an important key difference from popular music services like Spotify; actual ownership of music files.
When you purchase music, whether it be via CDs or online DRM-free music stores, once you purchase the file, it’s yours forever. You own that file. You can move it to whatever device you want, you can make copies of it, share it with a friend, it’s yours to do what you want with it. While it isn’t something tangible, there’s still real ownership. It’s not something that can be taken from you once you stop paying a monthly service fee.
So I started weighing my options. I had an MP3 player already that I had saved from my high school days, but to be honest, it didn’t really have much space on it and I wanted to get something that I could potentially put larger, higher quality files on. Now that I have my thrifted CDs, I could rip the music files from those CDs for high quality music. The file size of ripped music is far larger than your standard MP3 file. My little MP3 player was no match for the plans I had for it, and so, my search for the perfect MP3 player began!
Turns out, the MP3 player market is still alive and well, and there are a ton of great options out there that suited what I was looking for, but for a lot of them, the hardware quality often came up short and the one I originally had my eye on had tendencies for the buttons to stop working after a few months. So unless I wanted to dish out several hundred – a thousand+ dollars for a good one (I’m not joking, some really are THAT expensive), I’d have to weigh my options.
I scoured Reddit to see what audiophiles were using. I was getting pretty serious about my music files, after all, and I figured the good people of Reddit probably knew what they were talking about. I heard a few people bring up the classic iPods, how they’re still amazing for listening to music and there’s even a large modding community around them. People are repairing and refurbishing old iPods, giving them new life, upgrading the batteries, adding micro-SD storage expansions, all kinds of things. There’s even a program you can download onto an iPod called Rockbox that let’s you fully customize your iPod, from the look to the sound. And the cherry on top of the cake is that an iPod classic is built better than most MP3 players I saw on today’s market. All of that pretty well solidified my decision.
I next scoured Marketplace and Ebay for one. And it took some time to find one for a reasonable price, but in the end, I found one in amazing condition on Marketplace secondhand and got a bargain. An 80GB iPod Classic 6th gen!
In all its glory, let me share with you some of the wonders of what this bad boy can do.
#1. It has a headphone jack! I have greatly missed wired earbuds. And while there are USB-C earbuds available, I’ve always found the sound to be spotty with it. I am also not a fan of having bluetooth go directly into my head, for my own reasons, so having something that has a functional headphone jack is chef’s kiss.
#2. The sound quality is incredible. I have enough space to put my high quality sound files, and let me tell you, it is an experience. Especially with Rockbox! I downloaded an audiophile’s equalizer presets I found online and am blown away. I am hearing little details and background sounds in songs I’ve never noticed or heard before. The sound is so crisp and clear, it feels like I’m in the room with the artist who’s singing. I now fully understand the audiophile. Once you experience a certain quality of sound, it’s hard to go back. I’m probably an audiophile now.
#3. Speaking of Rockbox, there are SO many features included in this custom software it’s ridiculous. I’ve never had an iPod classic before so maybe some of these features were always part of it, but there’s a calendar in here, an alarm clock, standard clock, flashlight, custom downloadable themes (I’m using the Ratpod theme – it’s cute!), a calculator, metronome, periodic table, a paint program, stopwatch, visualizers, custom playlists, games (you can play Doom on it???), and TONS of other stuff. I think you can even download custom stuff to put on here – the modding community surrounding this device is craaaazy.
#4. It doesn’t connect to the internet and is 100% offline. Maybe for some this is a downside but for me this is a feature! Sometimes the constant bombardment of information, bad news, and advertising gets to be too much, and it’s nice to have a means to unplug from it all, no distractions, and fully be present and enjoy the music you’re listening to. With this device, I can fully unplug and just jam out and really appreciate what I’m listening to and experiencing.
Now I take this thing everywhere with me. It has accompanied me on our last road trip and hooks up great with our vehicle. I listen to it in the car, in bed, I can plug it into our boombox and play it in the house. It’s fantastic.
But the best part about this little device, above everything else, is that I own it, and I own the files that are on it.
I’ll never have to pay a monthly subscription service to someone in order to listen to my music ever again. Nobody can take my music away from me, and there’s something really powerful in that. We’re moving in a direction where we own less and less, and pay infinitely for things that aren’t even tangible, whether that be music, movies, games, software, the list goes on. It’s something I’ve become really conscious of. There used to be a time where it was common place that if you paid for something, you owned it. While regression isn’t always a good thing, reflecting on the things from the past that we got right is. Having true ownership over the things we spend our money on is a beautiful thing. This little piece of technology is a reminder that we can have a future that puts ownership above the perpetual subscription model. We vote for what we want in this world with our dollar. I vote to bring this back.
And with that, I hope you’ve enjoyed my little show-and-tell!
Does anyone else still have their old iPods, listen to CDs or watch DVDs/VHS?
Have you recently gotten back into older tech? Why or why not?
What are your favorite older devices?
And last but not least, how do you feel about the current subscription-centered world we’re currently living in? Do you think it’s better or worse than what we had before?
I’m interested to see how many people are returning to older tech as a way forward. 🙂