Turn It Up

iPod

I have owned several of those glorious things over the years. I recently came into possession of a seventh generation iPod touch. The stated goal is to cover for the Classic while it is, more or less, down for the count.

In the autumn of 2001, very nearly the end of my high school career, a friend came in with this fancy new music player. It was an amazing piece of technology from a company I had long since written off as meh in the computer world. It was a 1st generation iPod. It was a wonderful thing and after getting to poke around with it for a few moments I decided that I must have such a thing.

I had all of this digital music that a friend had given me to poke around with a couple of years before. I was carrying a backpack full of CDs around at school so I had something to listen to when it was allowed.

But this…THIS WAS A GAME CHANGER.

Problem was cost. I had bills to pay and didn’t have hundreds of dollars laying around to splurge on a music player. I was given a couple of mp3 players as gifts over the years. A D-Link DMP90 was my first one, once it wore out I was given a Rio One Digital Audio Player, and that thing was a workhorse. It got left out in a thunderstorm once and soaked more or less clean through. Let it dry out for a few days, changed the battery and it ran for another year or two.

But, as wonderful and liberating as those two were, they just could not come close to what I most wanted out of a music player.

I wanted something that could store my entire library in a higher quality than 64kbps audio.

I kept up on the iPod stuff. Never buying, but keeping tabs on the specs. I was ready to take the plunge in something like ‘04 when the 4th generation iPod hit the market. I figured 20gb was not going to quite get me what I wanted, but I figured it would work for a while.

There was a lot going on in those days and, for whatever reason, I ended up not getting an iPod that year.

I was super excited in ‘05 when a version with a 30gb drive and color screen released. I decided that year that my tax refund was going to be what finally got me into the iPod world.

By February of 2006 $300 would get me an iPod with 30gb of storage space AND the ability to play videos. I really could not see how, outside of upgrading storage, any new features could be added in a worthwhile way, so I went ahead and got one.

I considered getting one with a larger storage capacity, but ended up getting a 3 year, no questions asked warranty with it. That iPod saw a lot of use.

Like a lot of use.

A week before the warranty ran out I made good on that. The battery was down to ~half capacity and the screen had a few dead pixels on it. They shipped it off, and I got it back a week or so later with a new screen and battery.

That thing was still going strong when it got stolen out of my car in January of 2013. A month and a half shy of my 7th year with it. Fun Fact!™ I’m still bitter about that! My at-the-time roommate was nice enough to source a replacement for it on Craigslist a few months later. That one met its end in a puddle of coffee in the car. I don’t think I still have the pieces for it, but, now that I think about it, I may…

Six years later.

The replacement to that one was, I think, shipped to AT&T by one of my not so smart former co-workers and that was the end of that chapter. Shortly after, I managed to source another one on eBay for a reasonable sum – a 6th generation iPod classic with 80gb of storage. Again, that thing sees near daily use. Things got dicey for a while a couple of years ago when the battery decided to give out. Post battery replacement, it has been going strong.

Recently, the internal drive started acting up. I decided to take it out of daily use for a while in order to assess my options. While I would love a brand new iPod classic with modern features such as rapid transfer, flash storage, and Bluetooth, I have to settle for the fact that Apple is not going to do that for me. I snagged a 32gb iPod Touch, but it is… meh. Sure, it has Bluetooth and flash storage, and the things transfer a little faster, but it doesn’t have any character. It is seriously a phone-less iPhone, and that makes me sad.