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TOP/UPDATES/FOUR PILLARS/CINEMA/TV/GAMES/MANGA/ANIME/MUSIC/WRITINGS/FAQ/LINKS
I've never liked Apple. Even back when they were a somewhat "decent" company in the early 2000s or so, I never found their products very appealing from a design point of view. I've always found their "futuristic" design to feel more like toddler toys. Windows XP felt like my home. Even Vista, for all its flaws, did to some degree. MacOS felt like an airport lobby or something. That said, there was one piece of hardware Apple made that I look back on very fondly and still miss today: the iPod.
It was my first portable music player. I was already 14 by the time I got one in 2008 or so, so maybe that's a bit later than most in my age range. I first had the Nano 4th Generation, but clearly for a music freak like me who had just discovered Soulseek, 16 GB would never do! A year or two later, I saved up and got the Classic 6th Generation, though I actually got a cracked bootleg one that had the 160 GB disk swapped out with a 250 GB one! And I still filled that thing up to the brim... Sounds kind of sad to say about a commercial product, but that iPod is intimately tied to many of my strongest and most foundational memories of the "arcs" and "phases" of my high school years.
Don't get me wrong, iPods were never perfect hardware. They were made by an evil megacorp like Apple, after all. iPods were always good IN SPITE of Apple, never because of them. But when I think about how I'm forced to listen to music now on my Android, I miss having an iPod like you wouldn't believe. When I think about what was so much better about iPods, it becomes hard to distinguish how much of it the good qualities of it can really be credited to Apple and how much of it was just that the cultural defaults of our relation to technology were much better. In any case, these are the things that made both the Nano and Classic iPods I had so great to use:
If there's one thing I hate about all modern technology, it's the way that nothing uses real buttons anymore. It's all touchscreens. I hate touchscreens. They always feel very imprecise and sloppy. Of course, you don't need anything more precise if the only goal of your hardware is to more efficiently enable people to mindlessly tap through the drip-drip slop feed to the next ad. But for any sort of thoughtful web browsing or application use, they suck complete ass. There's no good feeling of response and certainty to your presses like there are on genuine keyboard buttons or even with something like, say, a stylus.
Of course, on a device like an iPod, you are doing a LOT of scrolling and moving back and forth. Having to individually press a button every time you wanted to scroll through a playlist or something like that would be a recipe for RSI. To fix that problem, the "wheel" navigator was nothing short of genius (not a surprise since Apple stole it after all xD [1]). Buttons on the side to immediately move forward one, backwards one, pause, etc., but a fluid rotating motion to scroll. And yet, it is not an amorphous movement like a modern scroll down a touchscreen page. It worked in intervals, so you could be a lot more precise with it.
I swear, the speed and ease with which I was eventually able to menu through my iPod is something I don't think I could ever match with a touchscreen device. And this has real consequences. The whole point of these devices is to be able to use them when you're on the go. And what if you're walking or on a bicycle or driving and want to change the song? It's much easier to when you can press a simple button a few times.
You might even be able to do it without ever looking at the iPod itself! When I used to drive with my iPod hooked up to the car, I even had a few buttons on my steering wheel designed to move forward and back, pause, rewind, etc. They were there for the radio originally but had functionality for plugged-in devices as well. Nowadays, I would at the very least have to physically take my hands off the wheel, move over to the screen at the center of the car, and press a bunch of touchscreen buttons to try to navigate the arcane menu. Simply put, it's more dangerous!
And yes, you can tell me perhaps that I'm not "really" supposed to make adjustments like this while driving. Come on, we all do it. Companies should be designing their devices knowing that people will. People complain about the (legitimate) safety hazard of walking while using a smartphones while at the same time not expecting the manufactureres to do anything to reduce the amount of time we need to stare at the screen. The truth is that we're perfectly capable of manipulating something like an iPod while driving with readily-accessible buttons. It's why there's been radios in cars for a long time and why they always used real physical buttons that you can learn to operate without looking at and being conscious of, just like a remote control for a TV or an air conditioner or whatever else.
Of course, we all know the REAL reason companies don't bother to do this anymore. It's because the average technology consoomer has opted out of having control over any of their own music or data and decided to just use Spotify or YouTube Music or some other program that shovels algorithmed slop into their mouths like the piggies they are so they are most primed to passively receive advertisements in their ears in about a 10:1 ratio to the actual music. This brings me to my next point:
Just think about this today: an mp3 player designed by one of the largest technology corporations on earth with no advertisements anywhere in the interface. No "reminders" to download new software. No AI assistant to suggest playlists for you out of your music. No news feed of updates from "your favorite artists." Nothing but an empty space for you to fill with your own files and a clean, intuitive GUI through which to access them. A true exemplar of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. The mere fact of how much our expectations for technology have deteriorated and become perverse since then is astonishing and sad.
The iPod had a fantastic interface. No wasted real estate on its tiny screen. It was certainly much easier to read all the text on the screen then any cluttered web browser or application on a smartphone. Perhaps some audiophiles out there may have wanted more, like a page that showed more information than track title, artist name, and album name. But that was its beauty in some ways. It felt more like you were listening to an album on a CD or whatnot. You were listening to, for example, "Kate Bush - Hounds of Love" and not "01. Kate_Bush_-_1_HoundsofLove_Encoded_by_420Blazer.m4a." Modern players on my phone don't seem to have found a way to make things as pretty, because I haven't and will never give up the priority of owning my own audio files and loading them on instead of keeping them in some ethereal bullshit cloud.
Of course, there was a lot of freedom in how you listened to music too. I listen to music by listening to whole albums at once most of the time, and I would always shuffle by album on my iPod. Of course, I can do this on most desktop players. But I liked the possibility of having enough music on my device to be "surprised" by the result of a shuffle and get something novel. All of that could probably be recreated on a modern device, but it's all harder than it should be.
I fucking hate wireless headphones, man. I see the appeal to some degree, I suppose, but what's more annoying than having to manage two batteries at once with your headphones as well as your main device? Not to mention the extra time it takes to open up your Bluetooth device, scan, pair, etc. Compare that to just putting a pair of wired headphones in a jack. Instant satisfaction. Not to mention how easy it was to plug it into a car, into a stereo system, into a computer, etc. There was so much more that was "machine"-like in these pieces of hardware back then and it made them so much nicer.
Both the Nano and the Classic were about perfection for me in terms of what size an mp3 player should be. Of course I preferred the Classic because of its larger disk, but both could fit snugly in a pocket without being either too conspicuous or too easy to lose. I should also mention that these things were quite durable and built to last. Another foreign concept in modern hardware.
My cracked Classic iPod died around 2015. I remember taking it to the Apple store to see if they could do anything, because I was still young and stupid enough back then to believe that the "genius" bar at the store was anything but theater. As awesome as it was to have all that extra space, the fact that it had been "tampered" with probably made it a bit more fragile. I still remember how the guy at the genius bar, while cordial in character, clearly thought I had committed some blasphemy by buying this thing. Imagine the audacity of trying to modify a machine that you bought!
I'm writing this and reflecting in a sense because I've noticed how much less music I listen to on the go these days and I miss it. A big reason for that is that I just hate all the music apps I've tried on my Android and hate listening to music on it in general. It's for this reason that I've thought of getting an mp3 player to start using again. A few years ago I bought a very cheap one from some Chinese site, but the quality was what you expect: the wheel was almost unusable because it was so tight and stiff. And the sad part is that even these shitty knockoffs are too full of bullshit features like photos and internet browsing and all kinds of junk I don't want to use a music player for! It felt like shit and I regretted my impulsive purchase.
Of course, the most difficult thing about trying to recreate that way of life is that the whole idea of using anything but a phone for just about everything is getting more and more alien these days. In some ways, I am happy to see this. If you look at an old electronics magazine from the 90s, half of the items in it probably don't exist anymore because we use smartphones for them now. From an ecological perspective, it's hard to not see that as a good thing. Much fewer rare minerals being mined and all the excess CO2 associated with the whole process of production.
But I must admit that until there's at least a slightly tolerable way to browse, store, and play music on my Android phone, I still want an mp3 player again. The Innioasis Y1 seems like a nice choice. Would it be a bit more "unwieldy" to have to switch between my phone and mp3 player constantly? Perhaps. But maybe it's not a bad thing to force me to put my phone away for a while.
1. Dante D'Orazio, "Apple ordered to hand over $3.3 million to Japanese inventor in click wheel patent lawsuit", The Verge, 2013/09/26. Of course, fuck patents and copyright in the first place. But I can't resist an opportunity to remind you how parasitic and hypocritical large technology corps like Apple are.