Apple never abandoned the iPod

Certain songs act as a direct line to your younger self. The devices that played them are a line that stays open whether the music is playing or not.

My iPod is a 4th generation, released in July 2004. I saved up for the 20GB model in high school. $299. It was the last grayscale iPod Apple ever made, and the last to use Chicago, the bitmap typeface Susan Kare designed for the original Macintosh in 1984. The same letters that rendered menus on the first Mac rendered my song titles twenty years later, on a 160×128 pixel screen I navigated with my thumb.

It was with me through college, the click wheel glowing in my pocket as I walked back from Suzzalo across the quad to my dorm. The iPhone replaced it gradually, then all at once. The battery eventually stopped holding a charge, but it still followed me from apartment to apartment. At some point it ended up in a drawer. It sat there for years until 2016, when I replaced the battery and swapped the hard drive for a 64GB micro SD card using an iFlash Solo adapter. The click wheel still clicked.

What Apple actually built

To understand why the iPod still matters, you have to remember what the music industry looked like when Apple entered it. In 2003, the RIAA was suing children. Annie Leith, a fourteen-year-old from Staten Island, settled with the RIAA for $3,000 over downloaded music. The recording industry's response to digital music was litigation.

Apple's response was to build something so good that people would want to pay. The iTunes Music Store launched in 2003 with every song at 99 cents. Then Apple partnered with Pepsi to give away 100 million songs through codes under bottle caps. The Super Bowl ad featured the same kids the RIAA had actually sued. Annie Leith held up a Pepsi, looked into the camera, and said "We are still going to download music for free off the Internet" while Green Day's "I Fought the Law" played behind her. I collected those bottle caps.

It's hard to imagine Apple doing something like this today. The company behind that ad has become one of the most carefully managed brands on earth.

For decades the music industry had fought the idea of files you owned. Apple sold them anyway. In 1981, the Dead Kennedys shipped their EP In God We Trust, Inc. with a blank cassette side and the message: "Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help." Twenty-two years later, Apple's answer to that same fight was to build ripping and burning directly into iTunes. You could pull a CD onto your hard drive, organize it however you wanted, and drag the files onto your iPod. An entire industry built on controlling access, and Apple's answer was to hand over the keys.

That was a philosophical position, not just a product decision. iTunes was one app that handled ripping, organizing, purchasing, and syncing. The iPod's firmware received the same treatment as iTunes itself. Steve Jobs would redesign any screen that put a song more than three clicks away. That's what happens when the people building software trust the person using it.

The iPod was the physical expression of that same philosophy. It existed to play the music you chose, and it still does. The music on it lived as files on a disk. That's the reason my iPod still works today. I've written more about what happens when platforms reverse that promise.

What Spotify dismantled

The model Apple built didn't win. Spotify started as a music player. The app now opens to a wall of podcasts, audiobooks, algorithmically generated playlists, and promotional content. On the free tier, Spotify won't even let you finish an album without inserting its own recommendations. Listening to an album front to back, the way the artist sequenced it, has become something the app actively works against.

Spotify built its editorial playlists on human curators with genuine taste. Then they replaced them with algorithms and watched engagement drop. The lesson, that editorial judgment isn't an optimization problem, only arrived after they'd already optimized it away.

Spotify Wrapped used to show you what you listened to. In 2024, it started making things up. The Wrapped year-end summary invented genre labels like Shimmer Pop and Cottagecore Trap and assigned them to people whose actual listening had nothing to do with either.

The music is still there. The trust is so far gone that younger generations lack the awareness that it was ever there in the first place.

Don't call it a comeback

Apple discontinued the iPod on May 10, 2022, after selling 450 million units over two decades. They never dropped support. Plug an iPod into a Mac running the latest version of macOS in 2026, on an M-series chip that didn't exist when the iPod was designed, and Finder recognizes it. You can drag music onto it. It syncs. Twenty-five years of unbroken compatibility with a product line they stopped manufacturing four years ago.

The iPod had been here all along. That quiet durability is why the iPod is finding a new audience. Gen Z is calling it "friction-maxxing," deliberately choosing a device that does one thing, without notifications, algorithms, or feeds. In schools that have banned phones, students are bringing iPods instead. Apple kept the iPod alive but not the experience around it. Syncing through Finder in 2026 means dragging albums one at a time. So I built a CLI to close that gap. One command to scan, select, and sync. An agent can do it by name. The interface for interacting with music keeps evolving. The device doesn't have to.

What permanence means

I've watched tools I depend on reshape themselves time and again. Against that backdrop, there's something defiant about a twenty-two-year-old music player that still does exactly what it was designed to do.

Apple stops making things all the time. What's unusual about the iPod is that it kept working anyway, even without being a priority or a supported product.

I listened to mine on the train to a Mariners game last week. Nobody decided what I should hear except me.