After the turn of the millennium, I don't think there was a single product that said
Welcome to the future, quite as well as the iPod did. It took an incredibly mainstream activity,
listening to music on the go, and made it cooler by like two orders of magnitude,
as you could suddenly have a thousand songs in your pocket. Instead of the dozen or so you get
with those portable CD players that always skipped and scratched your CDs, and then your batteries
would all ****. But of course, in the eternal quest for do-it-all gadgets like the Swiss Army
knife, the Bowflex, and the Magic Bullet, the iPod started losing popularity once smartphones hit
the scene, as no one wanted to have to carry around two devices when one would do just as well.
Although the iPod managed to hang on for over 20 years thanks to ease of use,
slick marketing, and for a while higher storage capacities than competing smartphones,
Apple finally discontinued it in May 2022. But could we possibly see a comeback of the iPod or
similar portable media players? Let's think about what made the iPod so popular in the first place,
it did one thing, and it did it well. It wasn't the first MP3 player, but its simple interface
and design made it user-friendly and undeniably cool when it came out. Trust me, I was there,
and I couldn't afford one. But the market for single-purpose devices has fallen off quite a bit
since the rise of the smartphone. Pocket-sized digital cameras, for example, have become increasingly
irrelevant as people are now shooting full-fledged movies on their phones. Google Maps is more
responsive than trying to fiddle with a Garmin, and phone flashlights can blind you almost
effectively as a pair of headlights. So digital music players would need to offer something a
smartphone doesn't to remain viable. Many music players that are still in production today set
themselves apart with higher audio quality than you can get on your phone. Assuming the songs you
put on them were encoded at a high enough bitrate, they support very high-resolution playback and
include quality amplifiers and DACs inside that can even rival desktop models. Some of them can even
drive high-end high-impedance headphones that would sound quiet or distorted on typical portable
players or smartphones, and some have a balanced headphone output to reduce interference.
You might also see support for higher quality Bluetooth codecs than on your
phone of choice, as well as a chunky battery to power all these fancy components for long enough
to actually make a player like this practical to use. Of course, all this assumes that you care
enough about audiophile quality sound to drop up to four figures on one of these players.
Most of us don't, and most of us can't tell the difference between 98th and 99th percentiles
of sound fidelity. So while there may be a niche for these enthusiast-grade players for a long time
to come, could something like an iPod make a comeback for the rest of us? Instead of overkill
audio quality, maybe the average person could be sold on more practical improvements, offer a 4G
or 5G data service that can only be used for music streaming when you sign up for a service like Apple
Music or Spotify. Home Security Company Ring notably uses this same paradigm for cellular
backup already. Give it longer battery life than a smartphone and better storage options for when
we want to listen to music in areas with poor signal. Most phones don't even offer SD cards
slots anymore, so simply giving people the freedom to expand would be a major plus if they spend
lots of time living in or visiting places with slower, unreliable internet. But you know,
I don't see any of these things being a good enough reason for Apple to bring back the iPod.
It's just not their style. Maybe the closest thing we'll get is a pair of AirPods with built-in
cellular connectivity and mandatory subscription to Apple Music. That would be a mass market product
that couldn't be simpler to use and is guaranteed to be money back to the Apple spaceship,
but that wouldn't really be an iPod. Which leads us to believe that the iPod as we know it
is probably permanently dead. But I mean, of course we'll never forget it. I mean,
record players were invented in the 1870s, but you can still just walk into a Walmart and buy one,
RIP iPod. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,
and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should
cover in the future or maybe your memories of your first iPod.