

You either get it or you don’t. Using a dedicated music player feels like treating yourself, whereas using your do-it-all smartphone feels austere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a nice phone, or if your music player is an old iPod or an old garbage mp3 player or one of those modern DAPs (which are basically android phones with fancy DACs and huge batteries).
I regret selling my old iPod, I would be modding the shit out of it if I’d still had it right now. But alas, it became “obsolete” the moment I got a smartphone with internet connectivity and YouTube and streaming apps.
…And one last thing™: the click wheel was awesome and it was probably the best input solution for a portable music player ever. It was truly special.





The only Apple product I ever had was a 5th gen iPod. I remember having to “sync” it to my iTunes library. The concept of syncing was alien to me at the time, it seemed unnecessarily complicated (and it was!). Of course, I didn’t put up with that crap for long so I installed Rockbox on it. That let me copy files directly. It supported .flac and a whole lot of other formats and it ran DOOM and a Gameboy emulator.