Comment by int32_64
10 hours ago
Apple should really do a 25th anniversary edition iPod with a scroll wheel, modernized battery, and modernized storage.
Do some nice nostalgia marketing for the zoomers and people that had one back in the day and it would sell like hotcakes.
They'd sell hundreds of units! Thousands even.
Although I can see them selling an original 2007 iPhone Anniversary Edition, fully upgraded under the hood and with a modern screen/camera/wifi/5G
But I'm only saying that because I don't like giant phones: I'm in the 2% minority.
Yes, the MBAs won’t like it. But maybe, once in a while, companies should do things because they are cool and not because it clears some threshold on a magic spreadsheet.
I’d even settle for Apple opening up the Music app so I can upload music to my iPhone from Linux. But once again, that doesn’t make the spreadsheet sparkle.
Lenovo did a 25th anniversary edition just because.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Anniversary_Edition_2...
They did that once.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108935
1 reply →
maybe, once in a while, companies should do things because they are cool and not because it clears some threshold on a magic spreadsheet.
The ghost of Steve Jobs has spoken.
You might be surprised. Companies like HiBy have a rather healthy music player lineup[0], where "fewer distractions" is an explicit marketing point. Similarly, despite rather capable smartphones being available for as little as $100, the "feature phone" market is still doing quite well - and it definitely isn't just the grannies who are buying them!
Steve Jobs famously launched the smartphone industry as "We are launching three things: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. It is one device, and we are calling it iPhone." Not having to carry a whole bunch of separate devices on a day-to-day basis was groundbreaking, and it was immediately clear that the synergy between the until-now separate features would open up a lot of new possibilities.
But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.
Sure, the market for a modern iPod refresh might not be gigantic, but I reckon it is definitely larger than the market for Apple Vision, or Meta's pervert glasses. The demand exists, the question is just whether it is large enough for Apple to care - especially when it means undermining their own golden goose app ecosystem.
[0]: https://store.hiby.com/collections/music-player
> But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.
Right. The Jobs vision was still an accessory. An advanced and staggeringly capable one, but an accessory nonetheless. It hadn't yet become an inescapable, addictively-designed pillar of daily life.
People are also coming back around to the idea that convenience isn't the only thing that matters and that a "split device" lifestyle can even provide hobbies with associated communities for those who partake. Curating a music collection comes naturally after picking up a dedicated offline music player and getting into photography more seriously follows buying an old secondhand standalone digital camera, for example.
That would at the very least have to have Bluetooth (and at that point they might as well add wifi, since that is more or less the same modem).
That would make a damn nice 149$ apple music machine, slap some stripped down firmware on it, so they can argue why it only supports apple music streaming.
That price may be wishful thinking. Aren’t even their base ear buds $130?
Yes, you're probably right. Ipod nanos already started from ~150$ 20 years ago.
FWIW, the last-gen iPod Nano had Bluetooth already.
Not sure it'd work without also bringing back the old iTunes... and that would probably be problematic business wise.
The Music app still works with iPods, but only for songs you own
It's a weird hybrid. You load the music into Music, but then have to sync your iPods with Finder.
Glad to report that Finder still works great syncing music all the way back to the launch day Shuffle, and even iPhone 3G, which I did just yesterday.
Best they can do is larger but thinner device, with large extrusion, and obviously 8GB of RAM.
Apple is in the ad and subscription business now, so either it'll sell for 899, it'll be covered in add, or it won't sell at all.