My iPods

May 23, 2026
It goes without saying that i'm a big fan of iPods. For some historical context, i've always known about iPods to some extent, but i never gave myself enough time to figure out what they actually were. It wouldn't be until Late 2022 that they started to fill my mind a little bit more as i had started to gain a bigger apreciation for music as a whole thanks to my dad. Alongside that (and i don't think this should come as a surprise to anyone) i was also starting to watch quite a lot of DankPods. He's got a unique brand of humour that makes his videos feel one of a kind and his videos scratched that itch in my head to figure out what iPods even were.

That's not actually what tempted me into buying one though. A few weeks after i started watching him i was invited to a night with my extended family. This is something that my family have traditionally done in the days between Christmas and New Years Eve. During our 2022 meet up i caught a glimpse of something that was laying on one of my Aunt's dining room shelves that looked like an old phone. I picked it up, and it turned out to be a 1st Gen iPod Touch. Being the flat design loather that i am should make it no surprise that i was overjoyed to see something like this on the shelf, but after i realised it was an iPod touch i then connected it to the DankPods videos that i watched and had what i can only describe as an "iPithany". Once i got home, i started looking into where i could get an iPod and the rest is history.

To start off this list, i might as well talk about the first iPod i ended up buying. For my first iPod i decided to splurge a little bit and get a 7th gen iPod Classic. I had a couple of reasons for this, but the main thing i was drawn to was the way the OS was designed. I do still love the looks of the other iPods, but my love for everything skeuomorphic lead to the 7th gen being the apple (hahaha) of my eye. If i had the power of hindsight however, i would have absolutely told myself to get another iPod instead, mainly because the hard drive for the one i bought was on it's death bed. It only lasted about 3 months before it bit the dust, and it happened right before i had to do an extended speech for something which completely killed the mood i had.

That wasn't the only time i dabbled with the 7th Gen Classic though, as someone was selling a modded iPod on eBay for a really cheap price. I don't remember how much it was exactly, but it was enough to tempt me into buying an iPod model i already had to replace it. The problem is, this drive was on it's death bed too. Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as my original iPod as this time the corruption was effecting the files and not the drive itself, but it was still bad enough for me to try and format it. The issue is, i don't have the correct tools to properly format an iPod around, and until i do this modded iPod is exclusively going to be used as a 30-pin emergency SSD.



During our 2023 family gathering i found out that my aunt caught wind of my new found interest in iPods thanks to the Touch i found on her desk a year prior, and due to her transitioning to using something else for her speakers (Which doesn't happen often as my family tend to use the stuff they buy for years. Hell, i'm pretty sure my family's been using the same batch of towels for the past 2 decades.) she decided to give me her 1st Gen Touch of the kindness of her heart. There were a few catches with this though. First of all, because i didn't know she would be gifting me this i had already picked up a 2nd Gen Touch a few months prior so i could get a feel for what the Touch experience was like. Needless to say that outside of the inclusion of built in Bluetooh (which you can get with the 7th Gen Nano anyway) i don't think there's really a point in picking up an early iPod Touch when the early iPhones act the exact same with more features. Maybe you could make an exception for homebrewing them though.

On top of that, my Aunt's iPod Touch has a huge burn mark near the top right corner of the screen. Don't worry, this isn't the infamous "Black Spot", it's a burn mark. I can tell because it not only hasn't grown in the 3 years that i've owned it, but it's also not effected the touch screen at all. As a side note, i find it quite ironic that a 2000's iPod Touch with a huge burn mark in the corner of the screen has a more functional touch screen than my Samsung Galaxy S9 that i dropped on the pavement a single time. I don't have much else to say about the Touch, as it's easily the model i've had the least interest in.



Moving on to the Nanos now, this is the iPod line that i have the most experience with, although it's not because i have a strong attachment to the Nano line. It's mainly because of how common they are and their use of flash storage instead of hard drive storage. There is one particular Nano that i have a strong attachment to, but i'll mention that one last. The only Nano i don't have anything to say about is a 2nd Gen Nano that i think was given to me as a gift. I didn't end up doing anything with it as everything it did was already done better by other iPods i had.

To get into the more interesting ones, there was a brief period where i wanted to dabble with the 6th Gen Nano due to it's unique form factor on top of it's multi-functionality as a watch. The one i found online was being sold at a discount as the Volume Up button was broken. I decided to take a chance with it by assuming that you could still control the volume with the controls on your headset as i just so happened to be using earbuds that had a set of volume buttons on the wire. I was wrong. Needless to say, i didn't get much use out of this one.

One of the most interesting iPods i have is my green 5th Gen Nano. This is because around the time, someone was able to crack the iTunes DRM to preserve all of the iPods clickwheel games. I specifically bought this Nano for the sake of running these with an iPod that had an external speaker. I am fully aware of how dangerous this Nano in particular can be due to the black spot, but if that ever happens then i intend on throwing that one out and getting a different 5th Gen Nano. (Or maybe i could get it running on that SSD 7th Gen Classic, idk.)

The most recent iPod to enter my active rotation is a 7th Gen Nano that was found in a Cex that was basically nextdoor to my old college. It was cheaper than all of the other 7th Gen Nanos online and it was pretty much brand new. That was in 2024 and between then and now this particular Nano has been through one hell of a ride. I initially bought it as a gift to my sister Catherine as i felt like she would get some use out of the Bluetooth. Unfortunately she was already won over by Spotify and she never used it. That then lead to the Nano ending up somewhere in her bedroom for the entire time when it was hers. About a year later she moved into an apartment on the other side of the country, and while we were clearing out her old room (which took an entire week due to the state it was in) we ended up finding it in a drawer. We decided to put it into action about a week ago when my dad gave me the idea to connect one of my iPods to a bluetooth speaker we bought during one of our trips to Macedonia. After i bought the right cable, it ended up running WAY better than i expected. I don't think it's going to be my main iPod due to the stronger attachment i have to the other ones but it's perfect as a backup device incase my main iPod ever breaks down or i need to beam some music to a bluetooth speaker.



Before i talk about my primary iPods, let's take a brief detour into the Classics again. There is one more iPod Classic that i tried to properly dabble with, and that was the 3rd Gen Classic. I found a cheap listing for one in good condition which had it's price lowered due to an engraving on the back. Even though engravings tends to lower the value of iPods, the engraving on this one was a tasteful pun, so i decided that it was worth it to get. I really wanted to get into this one, but due to it's weird restrictions with Firewire charging and USB syncing it was a little too impractical for me to really get into. Plus, i can't just flash mod it because 3rd Gen Classics are notoriously finnicky when it comes to external storage. It is still my favourite looking iPod by a long shot and i'm glad i have it for it's looks alone. (I did also have an iPod photo at some point but i gave it to my aunt as a token of gratitude after she gave me the Touch)



We're nearly done talking about my iPods, but now it's time to get into the big ones. Before i get into my current primary iPod, let me show you what my previous daily driver was. This is another iPod i found at Cex and it was a seemingly battered 3rd Gen Nano that had quite a lot of damage to the front of the shell. I specifically picked it up because i could tell just by looking at it that the battery had been replaced therefore making The Black Spot a none issue for the time being. What i didn't know when buying it was that this particular iPod would be my daily driver for over a year. I used this thing to death, getting multiple songs to over 100 plays in a list of over 500 songs. Not to mention the fact that it strongarmed me through the latter years of College by keeping me sane during some truly rough periods. It truly was an unsung hero for the last stretch of my teenage years, and i'm so thankful that it was there to keep my spirits up. I did try and get some videos on it as well, but due to how specific the format needed for iPod videos are, i was only able to get it working for one video. (Granted, that one video was Fesh Pince so it's not like i needed anything else my life, but it would have been nice to load more onto it.) This isn't actually a problem anymore thanks to a recent FOSS program that came out, but i'll get to that in a moment.

There are two reasons why i'm not specifically using this iPod as my daily driver anymore. Firstly, my iPod antics were put on a temporary pause when i moved from Windows to Linux thanks to there not being any functioning alternatives to iTunes on the platform, and by the time that finally came along i wanted to try something else out. The other reason is because this iPod in partucular is starting to show signs of killing itself. The iPod is now at the point where it frequently keeps forgetting what the settings for the device were, which is an early sign of either the battery or the SSD starting to break down. I don't want to doom this to the same fate as my first iPod by wearing it out even more. I could repair it, but the 3rd Gen Nano is one of the trickier ones to fix up, and i don't want to risk breaking it. Eitherway, the 3rd Gen Nano is easily the MVP of my iPod collection. I'll always be greatful for what it did in my late teenage years.



Alright, i've rambled enough. Let me show you my current daily driver. If you've seen this video then you'll probably remember that my recommended model for anyone who wants to get into iPods is the iPod Mini. The many reasons why are there general reliability, their sleek design, their great battery life and how easy they are to take apart and mod. If you want to know how far you can go, 1st Gen Minis can have their storage bumped up from a 4GB HDD to a 16GB SSD, and 2nd Gen Minis can be bumped up all the way from an 8GB HDD to a monstrous 256GB SSD. With all of that being said, it's a little surpising to me that it took THIS long for me to make a Mini my daily driver. Regardless, here's a photo of my current main iPod. It's the one on the left.



Now, if you know your iPod Mini's then you've probably noticed something interesting by looking at the photo for my Mini. More specifically, it's colour. For those who don't know, the iPod Mini initially released in Silver, Green, Blue, Pink and Gold. By the time the 2nd Gen came around, the Gold colour was discontinued due to low sales. This naturally makes Gold Mini's the hardest ones to come by. With that being said, why did i go out of my way to get a Gold one while knowing DAMN well that it would be a 1st Gen? There are a few reasons, actually. The first reason is because the colour scheme matches perfectly with Junichiro thanks to the Gold base and the White Clickwheel. I'd be kicking myself if i didn't get the Gold colour. Secondly, if i ever want to upgrade the specs for this Mini later down the line, i do actually have a 2nd Gen Mini in my collection which i bought a few years ago due to the music left on it by the previous owner. The problem with that 2nd Gen is that the battery doesn't work anymore, but that's not really a problem due to the functioning battery of the 1st Gen, and thanks to both the 1st and 2nd Gen Mini's being the exact same size, you could easily just slide the internals of the 2nd Gen with a new SSD and battery into the shell of the Gold mini. The last reason why i went for the Gold model was because of someone selling a pristine quality Gold Mini with a new Firewire charger included in the listing for 70 pounds. Due to the charger itself floating around the 40 pound range for it's value, it esentially meant that i was only paying half what i would normally pay for a good quality iPod Mini. (regardless of colour) alongside a better condition Firewire charger. (which was sorely needed due to my only other Firewire charger being in a pretty dire state)

Before i close out this post, i want to quickly talk about why i'm getting back into iPods in the first place. I never actually lost interest in them, but the problem was that ever since i made my move to Linux, i've not been able to access my iPods on my main PC. For some context, i actually used my iPods on my old Windows 10 PC's as both portable music players and the main way i listened to music on my PC thanks to iTunes working seamlessly with the music loaded onto the device and it felt a bit weird to move over to Linux as i wasn't able to play the music from my iPods into my PC as seamlessly as i was before on top of needing to plug in my old PC if i wanted to sync any music to it. Ever since i moved to Linux, i had patiently been waiting for someone to crack the iPod code, and half a year after the move was made (which was honestly WAY sooner than i was expecting) my wish was granted with the release of iOpenPod.

iOpenPod (which i'm going to be calling OpenPod for the rest of this page because it rolls of the tongue better) is a free and open source program (WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO) that aims to de-apple the process of syncing music to iPods on top of bringing quality of life improvements like (togglable) automatic backups, cross platform support and even automatic video conversions to streamline what used to be a baptism of fire. The only two things they haven't figured out yet are restoring broken or unformatted iPods (so for now you will still need an up-to-date version of iTunes and an active internet connection to start an iPod from scratch, which i hope they can get sorted out at some point in the future) and reading Mac formatted iPods on non Mac devices. Outside of that, OpenPod blows iTunes out of the water in terms of practicality and function and is, in my opinion, the single reason why i think now is the perfect time to get into iPods. It doesn't matter what device you have or what model you have, as you can get every iPod model (outside of the 1st and 2nd Gen classics which are rare as FUCK anyway) loaded with music without any software headaches getting in the way. If this web post has at all inspired to you to go on your own iPod journey, then welcome to the club. Don't get a 3rd Gen Nano unless you want some really fancy firewood.



If you want to check out OpenPod, you can do so by clicking here.

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