Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all had a great week. I had a nice week. Some days were spent working on some music while other days just doing various computer things.
Speaking of music
Apple officially announced on May 11 that their iPod touch - the last of their great iPod music player range - will only be available while supplies last. This means they’re discontinuing their iPod brand after it changed the way a lot of people listened to music back in 2001 when the first iPod was released. In a lot of ways, iPod and iTunes both changed how music was enjoyed and in a legal way and to stop piracy.
When the iPod touch sells out, there will be no more dedicated music player from Apple. No doubt with this news, there will be people who will buy up as many as they can and sell them at higher prices when the iPod touch is no longer sold by Apple. I think it’s ridiculous that there’s people out there would do such a thing, but that’s the way it is.
I sadly wasn’t an early iPod adopter at all as I was still very much into my beloved CD collection. If I had been, maybe I wouldn’t find the transition to digital so sad and hard now. After all, I still love reading the booklets and sleeves of CDs and vinyl albums, even using a magnifying glass to do so. One of my Uncles introduced me to the click wheel iPod probably around 2007. He showed me how it worked — how to go back and forth between songs and how to use the click wheel to navigate the menus. It even had photos stored on it. I was hooked from then on and couldn’t wait to get one of my very own.
I bought my first iPod, an 80GB iPod Classic in 2009, which I put my own music on using iTunes. I didn’t even start buying music from the iTunes Store until 2012. Early 2012 was when that iPod stopped working. I’ve had a few iPods over the years since then, some were even with smaller storage right up to a 160GB iPod Classic. It lasted until early 2020.
When Apple released the iPod touch in 2007, that was the beginning of the music player’s decline in sales and popularity as too many people - Steve Jobs included - wanted a device that did more than just play music. They were minimalists and wanted to cut down on dedicated tools. That was the idea behind the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad later on. The iPod touch was the first and only iPod that connected to Wi-Fi networks. It allowed music and other things to be transferred to and from the device wirelessly. You could also download directly from iTunes Store and iCloud Music Library.
I have to admit, as much as I love my iPhone and iPad, I’m a fan of the dedicated single use device. If you love to read, you probably have a dedicated ebook reader like Amazon’s Kindle. I’m not talking about the Kindle Fire, as that’s basically a multi-purpose tablet. With any of the other Kindle devices, you can read and read and have that storage dedicated to your book collection. Not only that, you can read without getting pesky notifications every 5 or more minutes. Photographers probably prefer a dedicated camera too.
This is why I’m a fan of the iPod and use my 256GB iPod touch that I purchased in 2020 as a music and audio only device — sometimes even music videos via Apple Music. Apart from the native Music app, other apps I use are Shazam, Signia app (for my hearing aids) and the Boom app for UE (Ultimate Ears) MegaBoom portable speaker. With my 256GB iPod touch, I have notifications for other apps, except those ones I've disabled.
Two other apps that I’d use if I had the iPod nano 7th Gen would be Podcasts and Audiobooks — because the screen is ridiculously too small to read print.
The thing that makes my iPhone and iPad more superior and better than my iPod touch is they both support Dolby Atmos Spatial Audio.
The reason I got my iPod touch is because I kept running out of storage space on my iPhone 8 Plus. Even when I didn’t have much on it, it felt like storage was always an issue. It is a 64GB iPhone. When I go into the iPhone’s storage section, the part of the graph that says Other would be quite large, but yet I couldn’t find a way to shrink it.
More on that in part 2 which I will post this Friday.
