Last month, I bought an iPod Classic at Best Buy. It was expensive but I thought the iPod classic was bulkier, larger and had a larger screen. I held the iPod in my hand and thought, this is tiny.
The iPod seemed huge when I was young. The screen also seemed bigger but then the iPhone happened and now the iPod looks short, thick and the smallest screen I think is even possible for a mobile device. I have to squint my eyes to see the screen. It’s pretty remarkable how much of a game-changer the iPod was compared to every other MP3 player of its time I proudly owned every iPod that was ever released from the first 5GB FireWire model that had a click wheel that actually spun. The 3rd Generation iPod with the touch sensitive bright red buttons as my all time favorite iPod. I never got into the Mini / Nano models. My iTunes library was always too huge for those devices. Even now, the 160GB iPod Classic can’t hold my iTunes library.
Of course, when Apple renamed the iPod app on iOS to “Music”, we all knew what that meant. iOS is bigger than the iPod ever was. You no longer needed an iPod app on iOS to make it appeal to people. The iPod has a music player, not an iPod and that’s all that matters.
I kept using the iPod for music until 2011 when I purchased the iPhone 4 in San Francisco which had access to 32 gigabytes of storage and Pandora. I relied on those to get buy and only stored my music playlists on it. Yes, only the playlists in iTunes fit on that iPhone. Disappointing but I was tired of carrying multiple devices. Since the iPhone 4, I’ve had the 4S and 5 and each of those have 64 Gigabytes of storage. Paired with a 64 gigabyte iPad, I can keep a lot of my music on them so that’s what I’ve dealt with. When I bought a car, it had a 30-Pin Apple connector that works with the stereo. So, on the day I bought my car, I picked up an iPod Classic. It’s been a great experience but I experienced the same unfamiliarity as I did when getting my first iPod back in November of 2001. I was lost.
The first thing about the iPod Classic I had to overcome after 6 years of iOS is the lack of connectivity. I forget how being disconnected feels. It wasn’t scary, but my habitual behaviors had me expecting to have access to streaming music or at least iTunes Match. I’d grab the iPod Classic and go for a run and when I started the run, I’d go to start my running tracker application and realize the iPod didn’t have that. It couldn’t even link up with my Nike running shoes and, if I really wanted some Beastie Boys, I couldn’t rely on iTunes Match to stream it because what was on the iPod is all you can listen to. There’s no other way around it unless you connect to the Mac and load up Beastie Boys.
Where does the Classic fit in 2013? The iPod Classic reminds me of an external hard drive. Sure, there’s cloud storage which is portable, flexible and never gets corrupted or fails but the external hard drive at home is cheaper, accessible and feels more rugged. It feels like something you can trust. There’s no delay to your files due to Internet access and the price per gigabyte is insanely cheap. Accessing those files from your iPad while you’re in Amsterdam isn’t very easy though so cloud storage is obviously the winner. The connected iOS devices I own (iPhone 5, iPad 3) are greatly superior to the iPod Classic. They’re more expensive, you can’t really work on them to replace individual parts and there’s a new one every year but the Classic is that external hard drive. Affordable, reliable and useful. It can’t play rented 1080P videos or iBooks but it plays podcasts just fine just as long as I remember to sync the podcasts before I leave the house.
For a device that goes into my glove compartment in the car unseen and out of sight, the iPod Classic is perfect.
As for what my headphones plug into, well the iPhone wins that battle. I can use Pandora, Spotify, iTunes Match and YouTube. It has my books and I can stream podcasts. The iPod Classic wins because 80% of my iTunes library is in my car at all times. It’s fast and gets the job done.
It’s no surprise that iPod is called ‘Classic’ at this point.It still has it’s place. I had 5 external hard drives at home and I keep a USB keyboard around for diagnosing problems when Bluetooth is not available (such as the BIOS) and the iPod Classic is sort of like that. It’s a lot of fun to own though. The battery life is insane!