I can't believe no one I've seen has called out the secret game! Go to Settings>About and then hold the center button for 5 seconds. I used to play so much of this bricks game in college when procrastinating from studying in the library.
Amazingg! I never owned an iPod, so this is my first chance to experience it, I had forgotten that I'd seen all those videos where you navigate using the wheel instead of the buttons
Really is heartbreaking that the click wheel is such an incredible and satisfying user interface but technology has evolved such that we have no need for it anymore.
We do still need it. Any time to need to scroll through any extremely long list in order to find a single particular item, the scroll wheel beats the manual binary search of scrollscrollscroll... too far... scrollscrollscroll back... too far... etc.
I would, unironically, use a device that had that iPod interface as a music device until my dying day. Make it only able to stream from Apple Music, make me load up songs through USB -- I'll do it.
I have a logitech mouse that allows you to unclick the scroll wheel so you can scroll at tremendous speed (the scroll wheel has a bearing). I highly recommend this both because it's surprisingly useful and because it's incredibly satisfying.
Once your music library gets to hundreds of artists and albums, scrolling through all that with a scroll wheel is so much slower than an interface where one can just type in a few characters and get the desired artist/album/song.
Just before Covid I got nostalgic for the iPod and got a used one and put in bigger storage and Rockbox, but it was precisely the cumbersomeness of the scrollwheel that caused me to give it up and go back to my phone.
Touchscreens didn't make physical controls lose their value.
Their widespread use is just a result of a tradeoff for many product designers, where a satisfying experience just didn't outweigh the dominating factors.
Some car manufacturers are in fact reintroducing physical user control elements. After reevaluating the tradeoff decision so it seems.
We have evolved to iPhone dark pattern updating to suddenly starting Apple Music in my car bulldozing Spotify and me almost getting in a fucking car accident every time.
My car plays "Africa" by toto every time I plug in the iphone to charge. It was a trifling inconvenience, then over years it became rage inducing, and now it's reached all the way back around to funny.
That's a "feature" of the vehicle's infotainment system. Some of the vehicles I've driven run Music the moment I connect my phone. Others are more respectful and wait for me to tell them to play something.
The aftermarket CarPlay adapter I installed in our Toyota is in the latter group. When I climb into the car, the CarPlay UI pops up on the vehicle's screen, ready for me to ask it to do something. Until I do, it does nothing other than show the homescreen with icons on it. A Ford I rented would fire up Music the second I plugged my phone in.
Yes! "Aaron Burr, Sir" starts in Apple Music. "Hey, Siri shuffle liked songs on Spotify." Queue "Aaron Burr, Sir" again until I pick up my phone and tap Spotify. Make it stop.
I grew up with mp3 players with physical buttons for volume, next song etc., and texting on phones with a t9 dialpad.
In both cases I could achieve the task purely by touch, without looking at the screen. Compare with now where I routinely mistype characters even while looking at the screen!
Maybe.. but someone thought that this exact format is better for kids to listen to music / audio books / podcasts from, a device that doesnt need internet access, you download what you want and need. Some people also noted (I think it was this device havent tried it) you can open the device up and put in a new SD Card to increase capacity.
You know that ring around the main button, that kind of functions like a D-pad with four arrows?
If you're paused while watching something, you can drag your finger clockwise or counter-clockwise around the ring to seek forwards or backwards. It's really nice, much finer-grained control than normal skipping forwards or backwards.
The wheel doesn't actually spin, but it also doesn't really need to.
I’ve never seen it work except in first party apps. YouTube, plex don’t support it, maybe Jellyfin does but I don’t remember. I’m betting it comes down to whether you use the built-in frameworks for video playback or bring your own.
Its spiritual successor is the crown on the Apple Watch. I never swipe to scroll on the watch. It's way more fluid (and you get neat haptics) to twist the crown.
I had a Gen 1 iPod with the physical, moving click wheel. It was amazing, and I remember the surprise I had when it would make that little piezo click on scroll. As the iPod aged, in my case around two years, I'd notice that my music was getting louder as I walked to class because the physical wheel was gaining momentum and scrolling. Luckily the iPod also had a hold switch.
extremely ironic comment considering there has been a Renaissance of personal music players lately, including ones with click wheels. look on Amazon for all the Chinese made ones. there is absolutely still a desire, perhaps a growing one, for dedicated devices, as everyone grows wearier of phones
Also as phone bans start up in various schools there are often carveouts for mp3 players. A lot of summer camps too that have no-device policies allow non-internet-connected music players as well. The market both on the super low end and the high end is looking pretty strong. Hardest aspect, from my perspective, is gaining access to downloadable music when most consumption has moved to streaming.
I got myself a couple. A Mechen M30 and a FiiO M21. First one is pretty low-end in terms of interface and firmware capabilities, but both sound superb, and being able to listen music without a connection to somewhere and not interrupted by notifications.
I personally never gave up standalone players. My MD is still alive and kicking for example, but I find myself reaching for them more and more for proper music listening.
It's a modern iPod motherboard replacement that enables the device to have bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UI improvements, etc. Surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN
I am not sure it is necessarily people growing wearier of phones. It is kind of a mix of gen z's weird nostalgia for things they never grew up with and the proliferation of AI music. I have a hard time trusting random playlists on music services because I don't know if it is genuinely new music made by real people, or ai the platform is pushing so they can make more money. Either way I don't want to be part of that. I don't personally own one of these devices but my listening habits have changed quite a bit in the last year.
My 2nd generation iPod stopped working last week. It had a spin wheel but its predecessor's actually spun.
The monochrome screen shows a folder icon with a warning sign. I haven't looked into it but I fear that something happened to the internal hard drive. It's one with spinning disks. It was truly a work of art, that device.
The HDD connector usually unseats slightly and it stops working. Pop it open with a credit card and reseat it. A more dangerous way that sometimes gets it working again is to wait for it not to be spinning and give the edge a good smack against palm of your hand. This usually works to reset it the tiny bit it needs…
I’m sorry to hear that your iPod might be bricked. I haven’t worked on an iPod gen2 personally, but I repaired an iPod mini. The interface for the small hard drive in that is the same as compact flash, so it’s very easy to replace the storage with something more physically durable. Or at least it is easy to find the replacement part - I haven’t tried the whole process on your iPod.
Honestly I'm amazed yours lasted this long. I had a fourth-gen 40GB iPod back in The Day and it was easily the least-reliable Apple product I ever owned due to that internal 1.8" HDD. Mine was replaced five times under AppleCare.
When that eventually ran out and it died again (in 2009 IIRC), I swapped in a CompactFlash card using a cheap adapter from DealExtreme. Once you do that or an SD card mod (more popular these days), have iTunes restore the partitioning scheme and OS and it'll be good to go.
The mechanical drive has probably failed. If you put the iPod in a freezer bag and get it very cold, it may spin up long enough for you to make a backup. But make sure it is in a freezer bag or something otherwise airtight or the condensation will brick it worse. The cold shrinks the metal enough to mitigate the initial friction of the drive spinning up.
From there, you can mod it to work from a micro SD card.
I feel like it’d make for a great interface for a physical controller for smart lights/speakers. I’ve got a Hue Tap Dial with a physically spinning wheel, but the click wheel would be great instead.
I’m half tempted to buy an old iPod and attempt to hack something together…
Customer needs and company needs are no longer aligned. The customer used to want the company to succeed in the long term. The company cares only about the next quarter.
Same with a lot of things. A synchromesh gearbox comes to mind. There's definitely something bittersweet about technology becoming obsolete and redundant.
If you're a trackball person, a lot of trackballs have a scroll ring that's similar to a click wheel. The Ploopy A+ has two discrete scroll wheels: https://ploopy.co/aplus/
I'm pretty partial to the Kensington Slimblade though. You scroll by twisting the ball itself - very satisfying once you figure out the technique. I hate the aesthetics (it looks kind of tacky) and the client software (bloated and buggy) but it's the only trackball I know of with this feature and I like it enough to put up with the issues. https://www.kensington.com/p/products/electronic-control-sol...
The haptic trackpads on a Steam Controller use the same circling motion to perform scroll wheel actions, and the haptic feedback is superb at selling the effect both audibly and from the feeling on your thumb.
I chuckle knowing that somewhere in Apple there is an SRE or engineer who is getting paged for elevated 404 rates, and has to silence the pages hoping that no real missing page issue crops up while we all hit this page. :)
There appears to be different URLs for different territories. For anyone curious, I've fed a few of them into an agent and they are largely consistent.
Huh! Alright, that explains why this damned thing had so much music from my own Apple Music library yet was missing so much more! I’m mildly disappointed that it doesn’t just load a user’s Apple Music library.
This is a direct homage to the click-wheel iPod — the same trick (Settings >
About, hold the center button for ~5 seconds) launched a hidden Breakout game
on iPods twenty years ago. Nice to see someone at Apple still hiding things
for their own sake.
It's really cute. I wonder if we'll see a significant market for plain MP3 players with the whole digital detox fad lining up with the nostalgia. There's already a lot of people buying refurb and bluetooth-modded modded ipod classics.
It's been happening, but just like all fads, especially nostalgia driven ones, it'll die soon. Every few years a new batch of people enter their higher earning years where they have more disposable income (mid to late 20s for some, early 30s for some, late 30s for others, etc) and nostalgia hits and they go crazy for a piece of their childhood or adolescence or their crazy 20s. If enough of said batch line up, you get a phenomena or a fad.
The sudden growth rate in sales derive some people to capitalize on it. Mostly either Chinese manufacturers or drop shippers though sometimes big names get swept up in the frenzy too. Then the market is flooded and it's not cool or unique anymore, or the target audience is saturated and then it's forgotten. I suspect something similar is happening now with screenless fitness trackers right now (even though I bought one because I hate smartwatches but want a fitness tracker)
It's especially funny seeing people who are into "MP3 players for digital detox" speak on podcasts or online. "I love that it's not a phone. I just wish it had <insert random ass app(s)> so I can take it on walks and leave my phone behind" then those random apps are different per person. It's really funny.
Similar thing with the screenless fitness trackers I mentioned. On every single review or discussion board for them, you will find people complaining that a screenless fitness tracker is, in fact, screenless and that they wish it just had a small screen for their important notifications or if it can answer calls or get phone notifications or connect to LTE.
Also for the troops. Have some friends that cannot bring devices that emit RF / BT on base or ships during certain operations and exercises.
It's extremely hard to find a new production MP3/FLAC player with upgradable storage that don't suck for one reason or another. Plenty of perfect new ones, but they will have onboard BT or Wifi still.
There's a bunch of options from Chinese companies as well as from more traditional companies (like Sony), but the majority run Android (some skinned to be "simple", some basically like the Android counterpart to an iPod Touch) and are built with super overspecced hardware which kinda defeats the point in my opinion.
Part of the appeal of the iPod is that it only had just as much hardware and software as it needed and was simple, which lends to its extreme mod potential that's fueling its continuing popularity today. A good modern iPod analogue needs to deliver on those fronts, too.
My friend's grade-school kid gets exuberantly excited by CRTs and VCRs, and I know a few Gen-Z's with record collections. Maybe there's truth to the Dennis Duffy joke on 30 Rock: "technology is cyclical" :)
I think I asked in HN last year if anything was happening in this space now that the click wheel patent expired. I ended up buying a $50 Chinese knockoff for one of my kids. It...feels like a $50 knockoff, haha.
I never had an iPod and only borrowed it a few times from friends. It is quite amazing how they manage to nail down this interface which still feels good even in the day and age of touch screens.
My 2021 car has sort of similar scrolling wheel to control the infotainment (which has no touch) and it's nowhere near this level of polish.
Feels retro, but still a ~decade newer than when this was state of the art. Some reasonably obscure artists. Thrice and Thursday released a split EP recorded in the Apple stores: I see Thursday but not Thrice here.
Thrice still makes music. Thursday has been quiet for more than a decade.
The first time I tried my friend's iPod I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Holding down the Play/Pause button is not discoverable at all but once you knew it was perfect. Your thumb never had to leave the wheel.
Somehow apple does not want users to turn off their devices. They removed the “hold the lock button long to show the shutdown slider” and buried it deep into the settings as well…
No single thing made me feel older faster than the fact that, when I was tween, the iPod was invented, took the world by storm and was the coolest device on the planet; and, before I was 30, it was discontinued.
There was a feature I loved that while playing in shuffle, you could highlight a song and it would play next. I couldn't do it in this version. They nailed the clicking sound.
Reading this as I sync music from iTunes/Apple Music to my iPod. Going on 20 years of service life (it's been rebuilt by a pro to have USB-C and Bluetooth, and a new battery) and still my library is intact and syncing works the same. Let's see how long it'll last :)
Very disappointing that the Music app on iOS doesn’t render the page. Would have been super cool to scroll in the app with some haptic feedback along with the click sound. I can understand why it won’t be there as you can’t directly navigate to a pre-determined page, but instead they force you to portal through their search button.
Even still, I’m a little sad knowing what could have been! :(
The ordering of the artists is interesting. Unlike most systems, 2Pac and 50 Cent are sorted right at the end. 50 Cent actually comes after 8Ball & MJG so it's a bit like `sort -n` but with numbers to the end. Is this an Apple thing?
It is an almost perfect replica of the iPod, one of the most generation-defining products ever released. We've grown out of these as a society, but I'd say that's something special.
There's not a way to give evidence for this kind of stuff but that's feeling it gave me too. I suspect a lot of superfluous stuff implemented in recent software is implemented by an agent. I haven't formed a concrete opinion on how I feel about it though.
The progress bar are vectors and not pixelated like they should be. A pretty obvious detail they should not have missed, but I understand how that could be harder to implement.
I can't believe no one I've seen has called out the secret game! Go to Settings>About and then hold the center button for 5 seconds. I used to play so much of this bricks game in college when procrastinating from studying in the library.
It's a Breakout clone. I mean that's what they're generally called in case you did not already know this.
it was called brick on the ipod.
woz and jobs did work on breakout at atari
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I remember loading this game on my video iPod back in 2005. It’s a tragedy that I never knew I could just play this through an Easter egg!
HOW DID I NEVER KNOW ABOUT THIS!!!!!!
Amazingg! I never owned an iPod, so this is my first chance to experience it, I had forgotten that I'd seen all those videos where you navigate using the wheel instead of the buttons
It’s called out in the macrumors article linked in the submission fyi
Also, holding down the menu key for a second turns on the "backlight", like the real iPod (for those that don't know).
Though it's cute that it's the 404 page, you can get to the page directly via https://music.apple.com/us/ipod.
Really is heartbreaking that the click wheel is such an incredible and satisfying user interface but technology has evolved such that we have no need for it anymore.
We do still need it. Any time to need to scroll through any extremely long list in order to find a single particular item, the scroll wheel beats the manual binary search of scrollscrollscroll... too far... scrollscrollscroll back... too far... etc.
I would, unironically, use a device that had that iPod interface as a music device until my dying day. Make it only able to stream from Apple Music, make me load up songs through USB -- I'll do it.
I have a logitech mouse that allows you to unclick the scroll wheel so you can scroll at tremendous speed (the scroll wheel has a bearing). I highly recommend this both because it's surprisingly useful and because it's incredibly satisfying.
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You may enjoy
https://www.innioasis.com/products/y1
which is loosely modeled on the iPod Classic. It doesn't have internet, though.
The Onion has you covered https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
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Once your music library gets to hundreds of artists and albums, scrolling through all that with a scroll wheel is so much slower than an interface where one can just type in a few characters and get the desired artist/album/song.
Just before Covid I got nostalgic for the iPod and got a used one and put in bigger storage and Rockbox, but it was precisely the cumbersomeness of the scrollwheel that caused me to give it up and go back to my phone.
Someone is working on a drop-in modern motherboard replacement for old iPods that will do all that:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xwB0ohq2xYk
Touchscreens didn't make physical controls lose their value. Their widespread use is just a result of a tradeoff for many product designers, where a satisfying experience just didn't outweigh the dominating factors.
Some car manufacturers are in fact reintroducing physical user control elements. After reevaluating the tradeoff decision so it seems.
We have evolved to iPhone dark pattern updating to suddenly starting Apple Music in my car bulldozing Spotify and me almost getting in a fucking car accident every time.
My car plays "Africa" by toto every time I plug in the iphone to charge. It was a trifling inconvenience, then over years it became rage inducing, and now it's reached all the way back around to funny.
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That's a "feature" of the vehicle's infotainment system. Some of the vehicles I've driven run Music the moment I connect my phone. Others are more respectful and wait for me to tell them to play something.
The aftermarket CarPlay adapter I installed in our Toyota is in the latter group. When I climb into the car, the CarPlay UI pops up on the vehicle's screen, ready for me to ask it to do something. Until I do, it does nothing other than show the homescreen with icons on it. A Ford I rented would fire up Music the second I plugged my phone in.
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Yes! "Aaron Burr, Sir" starts in Apple Music. "Hey, Siri shuffle liked songs on Spotify." Queue "Aaron Burr, Sir" again until I pick up my phone and tap Spotify. Make it stop.
Have you tried “ A a a a a Very Good Song”?
It is 9 minutes of silence so that U2 album you never asked for doesn’t start playing at the most dangerous part of the journey.
I grew up with mp3 players with physical buttons for volume, next song etc., and texting on phones with a t9 dialpad.
In both cases I could achieve the task purely by touch, without looking at the screen. Compare with now where I routinely mistype characters even while looking at the screen!
Maybe.. but someone thought that this exact format is better for kids to listen to music / audio books / podcasts from, a device that doesnt need internet access, you download what you want and need. Some people also noted (I think it was this device havent tried it) you can open the device up and put in a new SD Card to increase capacity.
On a roadtrip I doubt this stops playing music…
https://storybutton.com/products/storybutton-one
It kind of lives on, on the Apple TV remote.
You know that ring around the main button, that kind of functions like a D-pad with four arrows?
If you're paused while watching something, you can drag your finger clockwise or counter-clockwise around the ring to seek forwards or backwards. It's really nice, much finer-grained control than normal skipping forwards or backwards.
The wheel doesn't actually spin, but it also doesn't really need to.
I’ve never seen it work except in first party apps. YouTube, plex don’t support it, maybe Jellyfin does but I don’t remember. I’m betting it comes down to whether you use the built-in frameworks for video playback or bring your own.
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Its spiritual successor is the crown on the Apple Watch. I never swipe to scroll on the watch. It's way more fluid (and you get neat haptics) to twist the crown.
I've had my Apple watch for a very long and TIL you can turn the crown to scroll
I had a Gen 1 iPod with the physical, moving click wheel. It was amazing, and I remember the surprise I had when it would make that little piezo click on scroll. As the iPod aged, in my case around two years, I'd notice that my music was getting louder as I walked to class because the physical wheel was gaining momentum and scrolling. Luckily the iPod also had a hold switch.
extremely ironic comment considering there has been a Renaissance of personal music players lately, including ones with click wheels. look on Amazon for all the Chinese made ones. there is absolutely still a desire, perhaps a growing one, for dedicated devices, as everyone grows wearier of phones
Also as phone bans start up in various schools there are often carveouts for mp3 players. A lot of summer camps too that have no-device policies allow non-internet-connected music players as well. The market both on the super low end and the high end is looking pretty strong. Hardest aspect, from my perspective, is gaining access to downloadable music when most consumption has moved to streaming.
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That's actually great to hear, as my first reaction to the click wheel was "man I wonder if I can still get one of these".
Somehow, with all the world's music a tap away I listen to far fewer albums now. I loved preparing my mp3 players, like packing a bag for a trip.
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I got myself a couple. A Mechen M30 and a FiiO M21. First one is pretty low-end in terms of interface and firmware capabilities, but both sound superb, and being able to listen music without a connection to somewhere and not interrupted by notifications.
I personally never gave up standalone players. My MD is still alive and kicking for example, but I find myself reaching for them more and more for proper music listening.
Not my project, but I recently found out about Sprout: https://certainthings.studio/sprout/
It's a modern iPod motherboard replacement that enables the device to have bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UI improvements, etc. Surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN
I am not sure it is necessarily people growing wearier of phones. It is kind of a mix of gen z's weird nostalgia for things they never grew up with and the proliferation of AI music. I have a hard time trusting random playlists on music services because I don't know if it is genuinely new music made by real people, or ai the platform is pushing so they can make more money. Either way I don't want to be part of that. I don't personally own one of these devices but my listening habits have changed quite a bit in the last year.
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Do you think the renaissance is durable, or is it a fad? I wonder what percentage of high school kids are carrying a dedicated music player?
What is your favorite, easily wired or bluetooth loadable what ill call a personal audio playback and library device?
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I wrote a UIKit widget that acts like the wheel part of the interface[0].
It's cool, but I've never been able to find a place for it, in my software. I think it works much better as a physical control.
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
My 2nd generation iPod stopped working last week. It had a spin wheel but its predecessor's actually spun.
The monochrome screen shows a folder icon with a warning sign. I haven't looked into it but I fear that something happened to the internal hard drive. It's one with spinning disks. It was truly a work of art, that device.
The HDD connector usually unseats slightly and it stops working. Pop it open with a credit card and reseat it. A more dangerous way that sometimes gets it working again is to wait for it not to be spinning and give the edge a good smack against palm of your hand. This usually works to reset it the tiny bit it needs…
I’m sorry to hear that your iPod might be bricked. I haven’t worked on an iPod gen2 personally, but I repaired an iPod mini. The interface for the small hard drive in that is the same as compact flash, so it’s very easy to replace the storage with something more physically durable. Or at least it is easy to find the replacement part - I haven’t tried the whole process on your iPod.
Honestly I'm amazed yours lasted this long. I had a fourth-gen 40GB iPod back in The Day and it was easily the least-reliable Apple product I ever owned due to that internal 1.8" HDD. Mine was replaced five times under AppleCare.
When that eventually ran out and it died again (in 2009 IIRC), I swapped in a CompactFlash card using a cheap adapter from DealExtreme. Once you do that or an SD card mod (more popular these days), have iTunes restore the partitioning scheme and OS and it'll be good to go.
The mechanical drive has probably failed. If you put the iPod in a freezer bag and get it very cold, it may spin up long enough for you to make a backup. But make sure it is in a freezer bag or something otherwise airtight or the condensation will brick it worse. The cold shrinks the metal enough to mitigate the initial friction of the drive spinning up.
From there, you can mod it to work from a micro SD card.
I feel like it’d make for a great interface for a physical controller for smart lights/speakers. I’ve got a Hue Tap Dial with a physically spinning wheel, but the click wheel would be great instead.
I’m half tempted to buy an old iPod and attempt to hack something together…
It's still the perfect interface for a dedicated music player
Yeah; I’m basically never going to upgrade from a BMW i3 because the i4’s jog wheel and UI was such a regression.
I guess I should be happy they saved me $10-100Ks, but it’s concerning that western engineering apparently peaked in the late 2010’s.
Customer needs and company needs are no longer aligned. The customer used to want the company to succeed in the long term. The company cares only about the next quarter.
One of the best and most elegant UX designs of all time. I can't think of anything that has beaten it since.
I’d like a ring with a wheel that clicks as a remote for something like glasses or a TV
Just the idea of that scratches my brain in a nice way.
Same with a lot of things. A synchromesh gearbox comes to mind. There's definitely something bittersweet about technology becoming obsolete and redundant.
I did not find pulling the wheel down to push the cursor up to be satisfying.
D-pad would be better, but somebody sacrificed functionality for aesthetics
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If they sold a modern "iPod Classic" with a clickwheel and headphone jack, there would be a small but devoted community.
If you're a trackball person, a lot of trackballs have a scroll ring that's similar to a click wheel. The Ploopy A+ has two discrete scroll wheels: https://ploopy.co/aplus/
I'm pretty partial to the Kensington Slimblade though. You scroll by twisting the ball itself - very satisfying once you figure out the technique. I hate the aesthetics (it looks kind of tacky) and the client software (bloated and buggy) but it's the only trackball I know of with this feature and I like it enough to put up with the issues. https://www.kensington.com/p/products/electronic-control-sol...
Lots of ‘phones’ have a camera wart on the back. Why not several other warts for additional functionality.
So long as it does effect the perceived thinness at the edges, I suppose.
The haptic trackpads on a Steam Controller use the same circling motion to perform scroll wheel actions, and the haptic feedback is superb at selling the effect both audibly and from the feeling on your thumb.
came here to say the same thing about the steam deck, the haptics on the trackpads are very satisfying
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I chuckle knowing that somewhere in Apple there is an SRE or engineer who is getting paged for elevated 404 rates, and has to silence the pages hoping that no real missing page issue crops up while we all hit this page. :)
I'm glad I'm not the only one :-)
It's kind of nice seeing Apple get a tad whimsical with things like this. We don't really get that side of the company very often.
Yeah I miss the old Apple ethos, I hope some whimsy comes back now that Ternus is here.
What part of Ternus, the individual, has evoked any sense of whimsy?
The company, usually, reflects the temperament of the ceo. We had whimsy because Jobs was whimsical, not because Apple was per se
Ternus seem to be a lot more personable. On the flip side, the most you circulate the less elevated you become.
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Playlist data below for anyone interested:
https://music.apple.com/includes/ipod/data/us/en-US.json
There appears to be different URLs for different territories. For anyone curious, I've fed a few of them into an agent and they are largely consistent.
US 1,029 Songs 682 Artists 39 Unique tracks
GB 1,156 Songs 727 Artists 12 Unique tracks
FR 1,217 Songs 797 Artists 132 Unique tracks
DE 1,062 Songs 709 Artists 62 Unique tracks
ES 1,155 Songs 724 Artists 7 Unique tracks
Well now I’d love to know the unique tracks for each country!
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Huh! Alright, that explains why this damned thing had so much music from my own Apple Music library yet was missing so much more! I’m mildly disappointed that it doesn’t just load a user’s Apple Music library.
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This is a direct homage to the click-wheel iPod — the same trick (Settings > About, hold the center button for ~5 seconds) launched a hidden Breakout game on iPods twenty years ago. Nice to see someone at Apple still hiding things for their own sake.
It's really cute. I wonder if we'll see a significant market for plain MP3 players with the whole digital detox fad lining up with the nostalgia. There's already a lot of people buying refurb and bluetooth-modded modded ipod classics.
It's been happening, but just like all fads, especially nostalgia driven ones, it'll die soon. Every few years a new batch of people enter their higher earning years where they have more disposable income (mid to late 20s for some, early 30s for some, late 30s for others, etc) and nostalgia hits and they go crazy for a piece of their childhood or adolescence or their crazy 20s. If enough of said batch line up, you get a phenomena or a fad.
The sudden growth rate in sales derive some people to capitalize on it. Mostly either Chinese manufacturers or drop shippers though sometimes big names get swept up in the frenzy too. Then the market is flooded and it's not cool or unique anymore, or the target audience is saturated and then it's forgotten. I suspect something similar is happening now with screenless fitness trackers right now (even though I bought one because I hate smartwatches but want a fitness tracker)
It's especially funny seeing people who are into "MP3 players for digital detox" speak on podcasts or online. "I love that it's not a phone. I just wish it had <insert random ass app(s)> so I can take it on walks and leave my phone behind" then those random apps are different per person. It's really funny.
Similar thing with the screenless fitness trackers I mentioned. On every single review or discussion board for them, you will find people complaining that a screenless fitness tracker is, in fact, screenless and that they wish it just had a small screen for their important notifications or if it can answer calls or get phone notifications or connect to LTE.
My lukewarm take is that it's conspicuous consumption.
Music is cheaper than it's ever been for the consumer and segregation between genres or bands is non-existent on music streaming.
It's hard to socially signal when everyone can afford to stream and the search bar can show you Sabrina Carpenter just as easily as RYM or /mu/core.
However , you can socially signal if you spend money on an iPod, DAP, better headphones, physical media etc.
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Also for the troops. Have some friends that cannot bring devices that emit RF / BT on base or ships during certain operations and exercises.
It's extremely hard to find a new production MP3/FLAC player with upgradable storage that don't suck for one reason or another. Plenty of perfect new ones, but they will have onboard BT or Wifi still.
And they often phone home. You can't trust any Chinese hardware.
There's a bunch of options from Chinese companies as well as from more traditional companies (like Sony), but the majority run Android (some skinned to be "simple", some basically like the Android counterpart to an iPod Touch) and are built with super overspecced hardware which kinda defeats the point in my opinion.
Part of the appeal of the iPod is that it only had just as much hardware and software as it needed and was simple, which lends to its extreme mod potential that's fueling its continuing popularity today. A good modern iPod analogue needs to deliver on those fronts, too.
Something that runs an extremely basic OS would be great. Like the Zephyr RTOS on open hardware.
There's even a product that lets you retrofit an old iPod with a modern motherboard
https://certainthings.studio/sprout
My friend's grade-school kid gets exuberantly excited by CRTs and VCRs, and I know a few Gen-Z's with record collections. Maybe there's truth to the Dennis Duffy joke on 30 Rock: "technology is cyclical" :)
I've been using bone conducting headphones with on board storage so I can listen to music without carrying my phone everywhere for about 2 years now.
Which headphones? None of the Shokz aside from the swimming one have this; I'd love to have this feature.
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I think I asked in HN last year if anything was happening in this space now that the click wheel patent expired. I ended up buying a $50 Chinese knockoff for one of my kids. It...feels like a $50 knockoff, haha.
There's a whole product segment for this that seems to be gaining some traction. "Digital Audio Player" aka DAP.
Sony still makes Walkman
That’s already the case since a few years
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Hilariously, I can't load this in Safari, because it auto-redirects to the Apple Music app for that link, with no way to prevent it.
Pretty cool in other browsers, though.
You can if you long press the link and then choose to open in new tab.
You can prevent it on Safari for macOS by right clicking > open (instead of Open in Music)
Typing the url directly into Safari mobile worked for me.
This is so good! It's even got duplicates of songs with slightly different caps!
I don't have a lot of love for megacorps but I gotta give it to Apple on this one, goddamn.
Many (youngsters!) may not know how to operate an iPod UI!
Press and hold anywhere on the donut-shaped area, then rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise to move down/up the items!
For us oldies, the nostalgia hits hard; I'm reminded of the tracks I listened to and even the roads I drove while listening.
If they had a better sense of humor, the only U2 songs on the device would be from Songs of Innocence [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_(U2_album)#...
ah.. that awkward Tim + Bono.... finger whatever that was
I never had an iPod and only borrowed it a few times from friends. It is quite amazing how they manage to nail down this interface which still feels good even in the day and age of touch screens.
My 2021 car has sort of similar scrolling wheel to control the infotainment (which has no touch) and it's nowhere near this level of polish.
Heavy dose of nostalgia. That clicking sound is so satisfying.
you can even turn it off and on in the settings
Nice to see they've replicated the slight lighting uneveness near the sides when you turn the backlight on!
I enjoyed that Fall Out Boy has `Thnks Fr Th Mmrs` and `Thnks fr th Mmmrs` which are the identical songs.
Yeah, some of the song are duplicated like in the good olden days!
Damn that is a huge nostalgic trip
THIS IS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No explicit filter either!
The hip-hop playlist is 1000%; instant throwback to my 2000s living in Greater NYC
How do you get to this URL without iOS wanting to open/download Apple Music? I don’t even have Apple Music installed…
Long click and choose open
long press the link
Would be funny if this was an iPod OS emulator
is this ... free music streaming ... unlimited? :)
next product idea for Rabbit r1 team - 3D print a case with a screen that shows this page cropped to show just the device.
If someone still has a third or fourth generation iPod, there is a crowdfunding for an rp2350 based mainboard
https://www.crowdsupply.com/certain-things/sprout-pi-mainboa...
Im not affiliated with this project
I probably wouldn't want a Raspberry Pi-based battery powered device. There are other lower power (and less expensive) options out there.
RP2350 is a microcontroller made by the RPi folks, not a full Pi.
This badly throws me back to the early aughts partying at Beauty Bar in austin during peak hipster era!!
No wireless. Less space than creative.com/nomad. Lame.
> creative.com/nomad
That URL doesn't exist
I wonder how they picked the setlist.
Feels retro, but still a ~decade newer than when this was state of the art. Some reasonably obscure artists. Thrice and Thursday released a split EP recorded in the Apple stores: I see Thursday but not Thrice here.
Thrice still makes music. Thursday has been quiet for more than a decade.
These are all from iPod commercials
It seemed like there are maybe 1000+ songs in there. Were there really that many commercials?
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It's all from the Apple Music 2000s playlists. Period accurate, I love it.
Apple Music hires really good DJs
Nice to find some 00s electronic classics there like Alter Ego and Âme, that really took me back to my iPod mini days.
Those are some big song previews. 1:30 is a lot more than the typical 30 seconds.
No explicit filter either!
Im an Apple Music user on Android. It's sad to see that the 404 page works way better than the webview application.
Spotify just works on android but with apple everything feels intentionally slow.
The first time I tried my friend's iPod I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Holding down the Play/Pause button is not discoverable at all but once you knew it was perfect. Your thumb never had to leave the wheel.
Somehow apple does not want users to turn off their devices. They removed the “hold the lock button long to show the shutdown slider” and buried it deep into the settings as well…
Volume down + lock brings up this screen, they changed it with iPhone X since there was no more home button to invoke Siri.
Maybe when it's off it doesn't spy on you.
What surprises me the most is that they play the explicit versions of the songs.
No single thing made me feel older faster than the fact that, when I was tween, the iPod was invented, took the world by storm and was the coolest device on the planet; and, before I was 30, it was discontinued.
Cute, but I wish they'd spend more effort fixing all the bugs in Apple Music on macOS, and improving their navigation and recommendation algorithms.
I didn't expect such an nostalgia hit. Amazing feeling to scroll through artist names without being distracted by visuals...
If you want to search through all of the songs without scrolling on the iPod, you can hit the API[0] directly for the JSON.
[0] https://music.apple.com/includes/ipod/data/us/en-US.json
Soulless.
There was a feature I loved that while playing in shuffle, you could highlight a song and it would play next. I couldn't do it in this version. They nailed the clicking sound.
Reading this as I sync music from iTunes/Apple Music to my iPod. Going on 20 years of service life (it's been rebuilt by a pro to have USB-C and Bluetooth, and a new battery) and still my library is intact and syncing works the same. Let's see how long it'll last :)
Make this the default Apple Music interface
Clicking sound unlocked some memories.
>Has Propellerheads "Take California" clip >it doesn't have the line
Sad!
haha literally everyone had Ocean Avenue by Yellowcard on their ipod
On the hardware side... If I still have a 2nd gen iPod that hadn't been booted up in like 20 years. What are my chances of reviving it?
Roc the Mic. Beanie Sigel and Freeway. Haven't heard that song in a loooong time.
Ipod seems pretty cool. I never owned one, kind of want to get a modded one or a newer knock off
Happy 25-year, iPod https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50210732)
Sad that the only song by Metallica that made it in is I disappear :/
Very disappointing that the Music app on iOS doesn’t render the page. Would have been super cool to scroll in the app with some haptic feedback along with the click sound. I can understand why it won’t be there as you can’t directly navigate to a pre-determined page, but instead they force you to portal through their search button.
Even still, I’m a little sad knowing what could have been! :(
Using the haptics in the MacBook touchpads for this would've been next level.
the only iPod i owned was the touch. but for for an iPod that had a clickwheel that I had then was my gf's.
damn what a pleasurable experience of using a click wheel.
Ok, that's badass. =)
Oh man, nostalgia overload!
I love Easter eggs like those.
The ordering of the artists is interesting. Unlike most systems, 2Pac and 50 Cent are sorted right at the end. 50 Cent actually comes after 8Ball & MJG so it's a bit like `sort -n` but with numbers to the end. Is this an Apple thing?
Interesting that "Do You Realize??" by The Flaming Lips is listed twice under Songs, but its actually two sequential 90 second clips.
I think most (if not all?) of the songs are 90 second clips. I imagine for licensing purposes.
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Company made a thing. Remixed it a decade later. Fanfare.
It is an almost perfect replica of the iPod, one of the most generation-defining products ever released. We've grown out of these as a society, but I'd say that's something special.
This page was conceived by and implemented by an AI.
There's not a way to give evidence for this kind of stuff but that's feeling it gave me too. I suspect a lot of superfluous stuff implemented in recent software is implemented by an agent. I haven't formed a concrete opinion on how I feel about it though.
And what even is superfluous when an Apple FE eng (or product person) prompts, "make me a web browser iPod"
Do you have any particular evidence to support this claim?
The code comments are pretty clear tells
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Implemented, sure. Conceived of? Probably a human was involved somewhere
source?
They probably did use AI to assist but there’s a lot of detail and nuance with it that AI is just awful at.
The progress bar are vectors and not pixelated like they should be. A pretty obvious detail they should not have missed, but I understand how that could be harder to implement.
This is becoming such a lazy and predictable retort. Do you have any other quibbles that might of substance?
Who the fuck cares.