What I learned from owning my first iPod at 35
I purchased my first-ever iPod at 35 years old. That was just a couple of months ago, as I write this—actually, four years after Apple discontinued the very last iPod model: the iPhone-like iPod Touch. I had actually been lurking and stalking e-commerce platforms, especially secondhand marketplaces, ever since my friend and media contact, Jaime Bunag, a prolific tech reviewer, discovered an online store that was selling MP3 players from the 2000s all the way from China.
A quick search on a secondhand marketplace revealed that many Filipinos were selling their old iPods, in varying conditions, mostly decent.
So I finally found a good deal on a 5th-generation iPod Classic, which was first released in 2005. This is the model that was popular when I was in high school, along with the first-generation iPod Nano and iPod Mini. I haggled a bit to take it at P2,500, which was a steal as its only major defect was a patch of dead pixels on the LCD screen that didn’t really get in the way of enjoying the music.
Anyway, I never had an iPod—when all your major gadget purchases came from a tita based in California who loved spoiling us with electronics, the priority was really gaming consoles. The most I had in portable music was a portable CD player, which wasn’t a name-brand Discman, because Sony didn’t have a monopoly on CD players. I would only borrow my friends’ iPods, and I would marvel at all the songs they had in their libraries without needing to have a book of CDs with them at all times.
Fortunately, I would get my own portable MP3 player when I finally had a cellphone that could store MP3s. It certainly wasn’t as flashy, sleek, and polished as an iPod, but it served as exactly what I needed as a music lover. (It also really helped that the previous owner and I shared a lot of the same musical tastes, so I didn’t have to delete anything from the hard drive.)
The resurgence of the iPod
I’m not the only one who was hunting for a bargain on secondhand iPods. The secondhand iPod market is blowing up again, thanks to Gen Z kids who may have only known Spotify and YouTube, or maybe the iPod Touch that essentially worked as a smartphone without cellular data.
The report finds that the youth really want to undo the psychological damage that smartphones, AI, and algorithms have inflicted on us with a return to a more intentional, analog lifestyle, especially when it comes to the stimulation that music provides.
“Having a dedicated music device, such as an iPod, is a good way to reduce your dependence on a smartphone and avoid being drawn into other activities, like doomscrolling through social media feeds, when you only really want to listen to music,” says Ben Wood, a chief analyst at tech and telecom research firm CCS Insight, to the Associated Press.
As for me, the revelations of owning my first-ever iPod were twofold. First is that they have really, really great sound. The iPods were made to play audio the best way possible, especially if you use Apple EarPods, the first-party earbuds that the company made. Your phone, despite its audio enhancement features and graphic equalizer, was not really tuned to give you the best sound ever—an iPod was. The difference really is night and day compared to when I’m plugging into my phone.
Second is the fact that I get to enjoy albums again. Don’t get me wrong—I love the ability of playing any song at the tap of a button, and I don’t have to go scour websites to find where a specific album, mixtape, or single is. I also like discovering new music through the algorithm’s recommendations.
But a lot of the time, being able to listen to anything and everything can feel empty, as though my ADHD-addled brain feels no real thrill in playing an obscure track easily on Spotify or YouTube. For my iPod sidequest, I had to go through torrent sites and the Internet archive to find copies of the music I liked. Once I loaded them onto the iPod, the easiest way to play them was to play them by album (I didn’t want to spend the extra time curating a playlist; I just wanted to get up and start listening through it).
And playing by the album, with no risks of the algorithm transporting you to a different artist or even a different time in the same artist’s discography, was somehow freeing. It took me back to times in the family car on the way to school, where we would subject my parents to the bands, groups, and singers we liked, and they had little say in the whole experience.
You actually get to appreciate the record as it was intended to be listened to—although you can still shuffle an album, as you could always have on a CD changer or Discman.
A little luxury for music lovers
But I will say: After two months with it, it hasn’t fully replaced my phone and my music streaming subscription.
For one thing, the iPod I bought is breaking down a little bit. The 3.5mm headphone jack is deteriorating, and I have to press on the earphone wire to get the full sound. But it still sounds glorious when it’s cooperating, objectively much better than the music quality I get from streaming.
But streaming wins out by sheer convenience. Just plug in your earbuds or connect your Bluetooth buds and start playing the newest songs that artists instantly release on platforms. Collecting and downloading MP3 files was an art that we practiced (for those of us who didn’t buy songs on iTunes for 99 cents), but the instantaneous search-and-play on Spotify, YouTube Music, or Apple Music proves why most have adopted this setup.
In the end, it’s a nice little luxury for those who really want to go out of their way to experience what listening to music on the go was like in the 2000s, or for those who want to stop supporting music streaming platforms that pay out pennies to artists while enriching the C-suite. Sure, you’ll be eliminating the payout entirely by pirating or ripping an old CD, but since the rates are so dismal, either they won’t be feeling the streams you won’t be making—or they weren’t feeling it at all to begin with.
Either way, despite being discontinued as recently as 2022, the iPod is still here to stay. And with the way people continue to champion analog living, something tells me the idea of a proper, official comeback isn’t really an impossibility.
