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After the turn of the millennium, I don't think there was a single product that said

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Welcome to the future, quite as well as the iPod did. It took an incredibly mainstream activity,

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listening to music on the go, and made it cooler by like two orders of magnitude,

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as you could suddenly have a thousand songs in your pocket. Instead of the dozen or so you get

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with those portable CD players that always skipped and scratched your CDs, and then your batteries

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would all ****. But of course, in the eternal quest for do-it-all gadgets like the Swiss Army

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knife, the Bowflex, and the Magic Bullet, the iPod started losing popularity once smartphones hit

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the scene, as no one wanted to have to carry around two devices when one would do just as well.

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Although the iPod managed to hang on for over 20 years thanks to ease of use,

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slick marketing, and for a while higher storage capacities than competing smartphones,

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Apple finally discontinued it in May 2022. But could we possibly see a comeback of the iPod or

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similar portable media players? Let's think about what made the iPod so popular in the first place,

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it did one thing, and it did it well. It wasn't the first MP3 player, but its simple interface

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and design made it user-friendly and undeniably cool when it came out. Trust me, I was there,

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and I couldn't afford one. But the market for single-purpose devices has fallen off quite a bit

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since the rise of the smartphone. Pocket-sized digital cameras, for example, have become increasingly

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irrelevant as people are now shooting full-fledged movies on their phones. Google Maps is more

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responsive than trying to fiddle with a Garmin, and phone flashlights can blind you almost

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effectively as a pair of headlights. So digital music players would need to offer something a

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smartphone doesn't to remain viable. Many music players that are still in production today set

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themselves apart with higher audio quality than you can get on your phone. Assuming the songs you

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put on them were encoded at a high enough bitrate, they support very high-resolution playback and

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include quality amplifiers and DACs inside that can even rival desktop models. Some of them can even

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drive high-end high-impedance headphones that would sound quiet or distorted on typical portable

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players or smartphones, and some have a balanced headphone output to reduce interference.

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You might also see support for higher quality Bluetooth codecs than on your

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phone of choice, as well as a chunky battery to power all these fancy components for long enough

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to actually make a player like this practical to use. Of course, all this assumes that you care

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enough about audiophile quality sound to drop up to four figures on one of these players.

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Most of us don't, and most of us can't tell the difference between 98th and 99th percentiles

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of sound fidelity. So while there may be a niche for these enthusiast-grade players for a long time

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to come, could something like an iPod make a comeback for the rest of us? Instead of overkill

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audio quality, maybe the average person could be sold on more practical improvements, offer a 4G

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or 5G data service that can only be used for music streaming when you sign up for a service like Apple

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Music or Spotify. Home Security Company Ring notably uses this same paradigm for cellular

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backup already. Give it longer battery life than a smartphone and better storage options for when

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we want to listen to music in areas with poor signal. Most phones don't even offer SD cards

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slots anymore, so simply giving people the freedom to expand would be a major plus if they spend

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lots of time living in or visiting places with slower, unreliable internet. But you know,

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I don't see any of these things being a good enough reason for Apple to bring back the iPod.

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It's just not their style. Maybe the closest thing we'll get is a pair of AirPods with built-in

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cellular connectivity and mandatory subscription to Apple Music. That would be a mass market product

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that couldn't be simpler to use and is guaranteed to be money back to the Apple spaceship,

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but that wouldn't really be an iPod. Which leads us to believe that the iPod as we know it

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is probably permanently dead. But I mean, of course we'll never forget it. I mean,

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record players were invented in the 1870s, but you can still just walk into a Walmart and buy one,

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RIP iPod. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,

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and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should

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cover in the future or maybe your memories of your first iPod.