On Tuesday, September 9, 2014, Apple lastly killed off the iPod. After nearly 13 years in the marketplace, the enduring transportable music participant was retired with out fanfare. The pocket-sized machine with the clicking wheel and a small coloration show merely disappeared from Apple’s on-line storefront simply because the merchandise that have been introduced that day—the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6—have been being added.
Quickly thereafter, studies circulated that new-in-box fashions of the final iPod bearing that authentic design—then known as the “iPod Basic”—have been promoting on web public sale websites for not less than double the retail worth. Clearly, some individuals weren’t able to withstand a future that felt inevitable: a transfer away from huge collections of MP3 recordsdata saved on devoted music gamers and towards a world of streaming music delivered over the air for a $10 month-to-month charge.
Six years later, in 2021, Apple let the twentieth anniversary of the iPod go as quietly because it had let the iPod Basic fade into obscurity. Followers of the iPod, however, have been rising in quantity as classic gamers are dusted off, repaired, and upgraded with new elements. Teams of {hardware} modders are including issues like Bluetooth functionality, Taptic Engine suggestions, customized coloured instances, and terabytes of silent, power-sipping flash storage to their iPods, bringing the machine totally into the 2020s—all with out Apple’s blessing.
Kick Out the Jams
The unique iPods have been modular, breaking down right into a display screen, motherboard, headphone meeting, battery, and laborious drive, all related with tiny ribbon cables. With a little bit of know-how, it is now potential so as to add terabytes, not simply gigabytes, into late-model iPods by swapping out the older spinning laborious drive in favor of a more moderen strong state drive. Flash storage is extra sturdy and extra compact, makes use of much less energy, and eliminates all of the whirring and clicking typical of mechanical laborious drives. And since SSDs are smaller, putting in one frees up house contained in the iPod’s case that {hardware} hackers can use to squeeze in extra niceties.
Reviving discarded devices is one thing the {hardware} hacking scene likes to do. By adopting the iPod platform, hackers flip e-waste into clean canvases for expression and symbols of revolt in opposition to artist-unfriendly streaming companies. Cara Esten, electronics fanatic and musician, stumbled again into iPods after years of streaming music. “I ended up going to a storage sale, and anyone was promoting a 30-gig iPod,” Esten says. “So I simply picked it up. And I used to be like, there must be a technique to do a contemporary conversion … it simply runs off of a fairly fundamental type of customary interface.”
She cracked open her secondhand participant and added flash storage, a brand new battery, and a shiny blue faceplate, making it instantly recognizable as higher than the typical ‘Pod. After reentering the iPod life-style together with her reborn music participant, she took to Twitter to put up a easy manifesto selling offline music listening:
