The Death of the iPod Classic

[crenquis]

@NickyG

I have to think it’s something like a tenth-generation line of very high performance wearable computing objects that lie somewhere between the Apple Watch, Google Glass, and the earpiece worn by Phoenix’s character in Her

Electronic Prozac^TM It will learn your music taste and physiological response to the music and use it to alter your mood.

[julian_bond1]

Even if that came down in price, some dick used a 16bit signed Int for the track ID and allocated 64Mb for the track metadata. So show me the PMP and software that can actually use the space.

[tachin1]

I said you wouldn’t like the answer didn’t I?

[josiahwhite]

Going on the wearables trend, I envision the phone transforming into a desktop tower-like hub for transferring data to watches and/or glasses. Lose the screen and incorporate the antennae, CPU/GPU, and storage onto a belt. Size may no longer be an issue, and perhaps some parts may be replaceable.

[Ladyfingers]

Sansa+ Rockbox.

[julian_bond1]

Probably time I went back and looked at Rockbox again. Last time was at least 5 years and possibly 10 when it was still pretty primitive. As for the Sansa Clip, I hear good things and it is cheap. It’s the SD cards >128GGb to go with it that aren’t cheap …

[Ladyfingers]

Sure, but if you have a few smaller cards, they’re very easy to just click in and out. It’s not as satisfying as having everything on one device at once, but it’s still eminently portable. You could even make a little sleeve to hold them onto the back of the player.

Rockbox is about as good as it needs to be for the Clip. Because scrolling is fiddly on such a small player, what I did with mine was organise the folders very carefully by Letter/Artist/Album, and use Rockbox to browse the file system instead of the metadata. That way, you’re really just a few clicks from every song.

If you want to easily create a playlist, you can do it in Foobar and save the .m3u in the card’s root directory. It’s a barebones sort of approach, but it’s simple.

[BMcCooley]

This is really disappointing for those of us that like to carry our whole music collection around. After 11 years of carrying an ipod everyday, I don’t want to regress. I would have hoped that Apple would have come up with something to rival the 160 GB ipod classic by now, but no. So now I have to plan for when my current classic dies:

1. Carry multiple microsd cards for my phone. Not an eloquent solution, and I like having a separate music player.

2. Stock up on ipods now. I would buy another one, but by the time I need to use it, I might find it defective and out of warranty.

3. Get the new Walkman with 192 GBs.

4. Hope that one my ipod goes, it can be fixed and parts are still available.

[bwv812]

@julian_bond1

There’s no free wifi in a field in Lincolnshire, or while riding a motorcycle in Kazakhstan or at a full moon party in Bali. The streaming services are not available in Hanoi due to region restrictions. Google Music has a 20k track limit. The streaming services do not have a full set of Fact and Resident Advisor Mixes. Neither do they have a rip of that 12" dub plate from Trojan Sound. So, no. streaming music services are not an alternative.

Let’s be realistic. The poor souls affected by this almost certainly have a laptop they could probably load with their entire library, and with a 128GB iPhone they could come close to replicating the 160GB maximum storage ever offered on an iPod (and storage maxed out at 80GB until the 6th and final edition of the iPod classic).

And even if there isn’t free wifi on Kazakh steppes or Balinese beaches, data is cheaper there than bloated monthly contracts in the USA are.

It’s tough to shed too many tears over this.

[KarlS]

I am a little surprised that they didn’t offer a higher capacity Touch first. Typically storage capacity is an excellent opportunity for price discrimination and they are close enough that it shouldn’t be an unsurmountable technical issue.

[cellocgwisback]

I’m in the “carry my collection with me” camp on this one. I don’t want or need a pseudocloudbased method for “storing” my music (and videos). I want an actual copy on an actual device that I can access anywhere any time so long as the battery is charged.
Fortunately :-), in a couple years those 0.5TB SD cards will be cheap enough that the problem will solve itself.

[nobodez]

I guess I’m the only person who still carries my entire music collection with my on my iPad. I got the largest iPad (128 gb iPad mini with Retina) last February because I wanted to carry literally my entire iTunes Library with me. And I do. Sure, I only ever listen to the Four and Five Star lists (1300 and 700 songs respectively), but that’s still five and a half days worth of continuous songs (though there are a few repeats, since I’ve ripped some albums as continuous tracks).

I got my first iPod in February 2002, and went through probably half a dozen of them during my 2 year AppleCare warranty (I’m hard on things, and hard drives are fragile things), and then limped along for another six months until Summer 2004 when I got a 4th Gen iPod which lasted me another 2+ years (though I only replaced it four times on AppleCare). That was my last hard drive iPod. I got a 2nd Gen Nano in early 2007, though I only had it a few months before I gave it away because I got a Shuffle. The Shuffle (which I still have today) was my primary iPod until February 2008 when I picked up a 1st gen iPod Touch, technically the last iPod I purchased. It worked really well, and it finally died in May 2010 when it’s screen cracked. Luckily I’d already transitioned to an iPad (3G + WiFi, purchased on Day One), which I’ve since upgraded twice (iPad 4G + Wifi in 2012, and now my iPad Mini with Retina Display).

Oh, and even though I’ve had an always connected iPad since 2010 I’ve never really used streaming music, since there was always space for at least me favorite songs (the five stars), and now I just carry everything. I’ll likely still carry all of my music on my iPad (or perhaps an iPhone, if the Watch is as interesting as it seems) until Apple stops making them (in which case I’ll have to fall back to my Shuffle and carry only a small fraction of my favorite songs).

[noahdjango]

preach on, brother. touch-screens demand your full attention. dedicated button placement gets memorized and then you never have to divert you attention from what you’re doing to use your device. I “upgraded” to an ipod touch and daily I feel like throwing it across the room, either for that or because I fat-fingered the wrong millimeter of screen and I have to wait for the screen to load, undo that one, wait for the old screen to load, then carefully hit the right thing. with dedicated controls, commands were instant, correct, and you didn’t even have to stop what you were doing to look at the damn thing, you did it all by feel.

[Jehovazilla]

For me it was the UI, and storage space that sold me on it. I had tons of early solid state MP3 players before the iPod, all off them were used 3 times and replaced with my old weatherproof Diskman in a week. I hated having to decide what I might be in the mood for the next day, and I hated fighting with odd directory structures. I looked at things like the Sansa, the interface was horrid.

In college I bought I bought an Apple laptop on a very expensive whim, and it came with a second gen iPod. It was one of the few devices that actually changed how I interacted with something. It made me go “wow”, literally. ITunes was cool since it organized my burgeoning music library without spending hours on proper folder organization. The iPod was cool because the UI let me do what I wanted, and just what I wanted…

And now we take a step backward. I don’t want to rent music, or stay up struggling with what I want to listen to, versus what I’m allowed to listen to, then get to pay twice for the privilege (to apple/amazon/google for the ability to listen to my music, and to Verizon for the ability to actually get it to my ears). But this is progress, whatever the hell that means.

[Elusis]

@BMcCooley

Hope that one my ipod goes, it can be fixed and parts are still available.

Yeah, that’s all I can hope for now. My 160 gig iPod was bought second-hand, with a faulty lock switch; ironically that might have been a good thing in retrospect as it means I’ve never carried it out of a leather sleeve with a fold-over flap that keeps it from being switched on accidentally. However, I worry that it puts wear and tear on the headphone jack because every time you open or close the flap, you have to unplug and re-plug your headphones/speaker, so I tend to just plug stuff in in with the flap open, which of course might be putting sideways stress on the jack whenever the open flap pushes against the plug. [sigh]

I am very unhappy about this new development, for all the reasons previously expressed.

[Elusis]

@julian_bond1

There’s no free wifi in a field in Lincolnshire, or while riding a motorcycle in Kazakhstan or at a full moon party in Bali.

Or on a plane - the place I need my iPod most often these days.

[NickyG]

I just gotta say, and I know it’s obvious, but at some point, both the iPhone and iPod touch are going to be available w/ 256GB of storage. It might take a few years, but it will happen inevitably. Just hold onto your iPod for a few years, or get a new one now as a backup (or primary if you don’t have one yet but want one) and bide your time until the flash-equipped unit catch up and surpass the iPod’s capacity.

[billstewart]

Alas, one day I was carrying too many things and dropped my iPod Shuffle into a cup of coffee. After I dried it out, the battery was dead but the rest of it worked ok, so I could use it as a non-portable music player plugged into a USB charger (not very useful), or as a 1GB memory stick (still useful back then, though 1GB’s pretty small these days.)

I still have a larger-format iPod that I acquired a year or two later (I forget it if was a trade-show raffle or if it was one of those times that my job thought we’d be more motivated by shiny consumer electronics than by money or better working conditions), and I used it for a while; it’s probably in a drawer somewhere.

And yeah, I agree that the iTunes Store was what made the iPod more than just a shiny MP3 player. (And one of my friends spent a New Year’s Eve party the first year with her Danger hiptop email device keeping her up to date on the state of the iTunes Store servers, in case they needed fixing

[Jehovazilla]

@NickyG

but at some point, both the iPhone and iPod touch are going to be available w/ 256GB of storage.

Sadly, I am one of the last people in the world who prefers dedicated monotaskers, over bloated multitaskers. Not going to get an iPhone just to play music. Wouldn’t want a touch since I just want my music player to play music, and not compete with my PC or phone for redundant features.

Just like my phone will never replace my DSLR, my phone will never replace a dedicated music player.