I adore the shuffle, and have replaced mine twice. I don’t want to carry a phone to go for a walk or a run, and I don’t want to fiddle with a screen to play my music and podcasts, especially at night. I haven’t found anything as small, lightweight, and easy to use.
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The Shuffle definitely had its niche — there’s no denying that. It just wasn’t for me so I never paid much attention to it.
I used to use my iPod as the music source on my Loud Bike. It really only had one annoying problem, that I had to wait five seconds after touching the buttons before I could change the volume again. I ended up switching to a cheap tablet.
The smartphone sucks as a dedicated music player, since everyone gets to hear your tweedles and beeps when it does phone things in the middle of a song.
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but but
~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache
is such an obvious place to store downloaded podcasts. It’s User Experiences like those that make me never want to leave Apple’s warm comfy garden!
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I’ve never had an Apple thing, but years ago I got my mom an iPod (mini? Was that a thing?) for a birthday, and wanted to pre-load it with some of her favorite music. I was shocked that the damned thing made me install iTunes on my Laptop just so I could stick some MP3s on it. It kept trying to mirror my whole MP3 collection, and getting the metadata right was kind of a pain, too. I was so happy to uninstall that software and never use it again.
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My clickwheel iPod Classic still works and holds all my music (plus I can see which podcasts have actually downloaded) and I use it either in the old plug-in speaker cradle over my drawing table or on my belt when I go on bike rides, since the multiple award-winning touch controls can be used without having to look at them! My MP3 collection is getting close to 128GB these days, so I just picked up one of the last 256GB 7th gens I could find. As long as they still work and the Mac OS doesn’t leave them behind completely, it’s probably just as well, as Apple’s music and podcast software has been getting steadily worse for years. 
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I’m obsessive about my metadata and iTunes royally sucks at this. I use other tools to update my music files rather than iTunes. (Such as MusicBrainz Picard and MP3Tag.)
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I cannot quite remember my initial reaction to the 2001 iPod announcement, but I do recall having some envy that it was not yet compatible with PCs. It had a lot of desirable specs but it did have a high price (the late 90s flash players were limited for their capacity).
I was using a Sony Discman at the time.
My first MP3 player was a Creative Nomad (a smaller device closer to the ipod in size which followed the ipod into the market.
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Funny because literally within the last week I heard or read someone on one of the things that I listen to or read marveling at the fact that Apple still makes an iPod
I have a new-ish iPod (maybe two years old?), and yes it’s an iPhone without the phone part, but you know what? It does the one thing I ask it to do & does it well: play my personal music collection as curated by me, not some Spotify algorithm (nothing against Spotify, just an example).
I work nights in a room to myself & I just want to sit here quietly with my ripped CD collection, not having to bother with apps and whatnot. The iPod allows this in a manner in which I find pleasing.
I get that I may be in the overall minority and Apple must do what they feel is necessary, but my iPod suits me.
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Exactly. Weight/Form factor/Battery capacity-wise, the iPhone just isnt there yet: eg, it’s not a “weightless” device you can carry during exercise. The iPod filled a niche the iPhone cannot. This is gonna hurt.
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THIS! (Fuckers!)
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Paper? 
As a runner, I LOVED the form factor of the iPod shuffle.
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Any recommendations on a non-Apple replacement that would work with IOS? Looks like other people are still selling MP3 players, but not sure if I’ll be able to convert songs from Apple’s format into MP3. It’s for my father in-law who is still leaning hard on his old shuffle. Any ideas?
Um…my 13 year old car does not have Car Play, I use my iPod every day. My 20 year old car doesn’t even have a data jack, so I use a bluetooth radio transmitter to play my iPod. I like my music, dammit.
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I had an iPod touch with the safari browser… and a youtube app which stopped being upgraded so… but all that music… lots of singles and playlists which apple won’t back up to the cloud annoys me… so much
still using two of three ipod classic’s…
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I use my iPod classic video all the time. The key is to upgrade the space to solid state, I only have a 128 gig SD in it but you can even toss a 1 TB SSD in them now. Along with the rockbox firmware I can play any audio format ever made, no iTunes needed. Linux and windows alike can add and remove files and I can even play Doom on the thing if I want. From Amiga MOD files to uncompressed OGG, it just works. I will keep it until it burns out. And yes, the iPod theme works the best so it still looks like an iPod.
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Indeed; Plex is SUPER SUPER SUPER anal retentive about metadata.
(Come to think about it, so is iTunes and the music app on iOS devices- why else would it split an album when there’s more than one artist listed on the album??)
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