they work great with Clementine, too, which is cross-platform. and with a SD/flash adapter and Rockbox, the older models can still be capable little devices today. rockbox, at least, does start to chug a little with dynamic playlists over several thousand songs, though…
honestly, the only thing the classics are missing for me is a physical off/reset switch. sometimes i’ve needed to reboot to apply a mod or something, or the little thing freezes, and if the hidden key combos don’t work for whatever reason, then i have to spudge the dang thing open and reseat the battery’s ribbon cable
I have three clickwheel iPods that I rotate through, and they’re wonderful to use. Currently syncing them through the public beta of Sonoma on my 15" MacBook Air, so fuck knows why he thinks Ventura is a problem.
So one fifth of this is back story to what an iPod is, one fifth is “I knew I had to write 1000 words for iMore, but still didn’t bother finding the cable and adapter in advance”, another fifth is “But syncing is HARD”. Then we get to revisit the cable bit, but now he’s complaining that his preferred headphones won’t work, then finally he wraps up with a paragraph about how it’s quite nice, but Spotify would have been easier.
Eh, I dunno. I just feel like he’s making it sound way harder than it is to use an iPod now. Sure, it is easier to stream, but that isn’t the point, is it? Besides, he’s lucky that his iPod actually works. All three of mine had to undergo some significant surgery before I could get them to anything useful. Only one of them is stock, and that’s because I rebuilt it from the working parts of two broken ones.
I use my iPods because they’re deliberate. The music they contain is music I chose. If I suddenly decide to listen to something that isn’t on there, then I’m out of luck until I can add it to my library. That brings a certain stillness to my musical wandering that I really struggle with when using Apple Music.
All that said, I was there when iPod was current tech, so my mind is still wired for being able to make them work. My kid’s roommate at uni has a Bose speaker with an iPod dock, so he asked if he could borrow one of mine to load up with all their music. A week later he gave it back to me, having given up trying to figure out how to a) get the music, and b) sync the music to the iPod. I got it though, he’s grown up with Apple Music, he’s literally never had to sync anything to an external device before.
It's funny that the author didn't think to try Music.app instead of doinking about in Finder. I just did this a couple of weeks ago with my own iPod Classic: Music supports iPod sync just fine. (Yes, still!)
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