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iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

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Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#21

Post by flir »

ilamont wrote: post #3

My daughter started asking to use my old digital cameras about 3 or 4 years ago, the ones from the early 2000s. "Why would you want to use those?" I asked her. "Your phone's camera is way better." She said she liked "the look" (of the photos) and mentioned that some people she followed on Instagram used them. Turns out there's a universe of retro photo accounts using film, old digital cameras, and old video cameras.…

Back when lomo was popular (still got mine, somewhere) I played around with drilling a tiny hole in a film SLR body cap and turning it into a pinhole camera. That produced some fun results.

Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#22

Post by dabluecaboose »

Just for anyone who's now thinking about using/restoring/upgrading their old iPod, I did it last year to my old 5th gen and I can highly recommend it. It's easy and rewarding.

I can highly recommend this site for parts: https://eoe.works/

Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#23

Post by bwoodward »

slotrans wrote: post #5

Still using my 2006 iPod. I've replaced the battery (easy, $8) and replaced the hard drive with an SDXC adapter which bumped the capacity from 80GB to 256GB. Such a great device. My car knows how to control it so I mostly just leave it in the car. Also great on airplanes, with the card conversion it has many hours of battery life. Amazing how every comparable device made today is so much worse.

I modded an 80gb iPod Video / 5G with the same iFlash quad (400gb+ right now with two slots free)

I felt like I never had to charge the thing, so I just let it run. It went for just over 60hrs and still had 5% to go.

Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#25

Post by kylebyte »

function_seven wrote: post #6
kylebyte wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to think that for people without clear memories of it, the 2000's might be imagined in the style of early digital photos the same way the 70's look like Super 8 footage or the early 20th century is sepia toned in my head.

Something that occurred to me the other day regarding my own "memories" of times before I was born: From 1965–Present, the world is in color. The tone shifts a bit, but it's all in color. 1900–1964: Black and white. The world was actually black and white. Sometimes people moved around at a weird frame-rate :) 1800–1899: Color, but very much sepia toned. The whole world was slightly dirty and brownish, but the sky was…

I have pretty much the same mental image, though with the 40's and 50's having some color probably mostly from period movies about that time.

What I really wonder is whether the photos and videos we're taking in the present will have some kind of subjective effect on how people remember our current time. It feels like we're finally at a point where most media has the fidelity to capture an objective image of the world, but that could just be that since we have the reference point of living through these times our minds can fill in the blanks.

Maybe the original comment I replied to's grandkid will want to borrow their old iPhone 12 to take retro pictures with someday.

Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#26

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

Shawnj2 wrote: post #17
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #13

Standalone MP3 players are increasingly useful, now that: 1) Most smartphones lack a headphone jack 2) Most smartphones lack an SD card slot 3) Your phone is probably the most important thing you have on your person, and conserving the battery life is more important than listening to music I unfortunately ditched my Sansa Fuse mp3 player after I got my first smartphone, because the Galaxy S2 felt like a straight upgr…

The YouTuber DankPods has an argument that the last iPod Touch is actually a good device for this use case because has a then-modern A10 which is well faster than what you need to run an MP3 player, you can use it with music streaming services to download your catalog, it has a headphone Jack, and it’s not that expensive to get a high capacity one.

That's all well and good, but I never had an iPod during its heyday. I had a Creative Zen Touch circa 2005/2006, and then the aforementioned Sansa's around 2009-2010. And, of course, my Android phones. I don't aim to change that now--it's a matter of pride.

Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#27

Post by bondarchuk »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #13

Standalone MP3 players are increasingly useful, now that: 1) Most smartphones lack a headphone jack 2) Most smartphones lack an SD card slot 3) Your phone is probably the most important thing you have on your person, and conserving the battery life is more important than listening to music I unfortunately ditched my Sansa Fuse mp3 player after I got my first smartphone, because the Galaxy S2 felt like a straight upgr…

Surfans F20 with rockbox is quite decent and not too expensive (100-150 bucks iirc).

Re: iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters

#28

Post by sandreas »

The iPod is such an underestimated device... I'm still searching for a comparable replacement of my iPod Nano 6G / 7G. The thing is: Even modern Android players throwing tons of features at it, can't really compete with the user experience.

Most people only listen to music, so they will never miss the awesome audio book and podcast integration of the whole iPod line (besides the good music ability).

The iPod Nano is many years old and still:

  - Is REALLY small
  - Already has bluetooth low energy
  - Supports cable headphone remote controls (EarPods have questionable audio quality, but the remote works absolutely flawless)
  - Can play a variety of formats for a really long time with a 220mah battery
  - Supports audio book single files with chapters (m4b format)
I modded many iPod Classics with Rockbox and iFlash Quads, but the original interface is hard to beat in terms of audio books. Unfortunately repairing iPod Nanos is really tough compared to the iPod classic 2009 (even this device already supports the cable headphone controls). Currenlty I'm trying to mod an iPod Nano 7G to have a 600mah battery by milling out the backplate, keeping the original BMS and placing an iPod Mini Battery (which fits perfectly in size, when the backplate is milled out). This way I hope I will have the only iPod Nano 7G with interchangeable batteries ;)

The best alternative I found so far is the Unihertz Jelly 2(e) Phone with selfhosted Audiobookshelf and different player / sync apps, but the experience is nowhere near the iPod... It's bigger, way thicker and the headphone controls are "unstable". Not to talk about the app crashes, unsupported android background service playing and missing / non-working chapter controls.

Disclaimer: I'm the developer of m4b-tool[1] and tone[2], so I know what I'm talking about :-)

[1]: https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool [2]: https://github.com/sandreas/tone

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