Goodbye iPods

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61401626

I'm surprised that the iPod has only been around for 21 years.
CDs are coming up to forty while cassettes and vinyl have been around for as long as I have remember.
Of course, as mentioned in the article, there were MP3 players around before them.

I've had/have several iPods and iPads some bought new.
One day I will have to get a Smartphone although IMHO their design has been going backwards recently.

 

As sad as this news may look, the time was long overdue for Apple to finally ditch the iPod. DAPs will continue to exist, but the market is a different one than it was 20 or even 15 years ago.
Back then, MP3s were the main source of music, now streaming services are dominating the market by a large margin. Then the wireless headphones have rendered DAPs with good DACs and amps not that useful for the average consumer.

So to me, it is not surprising that is has finally happened. I dare to say it was even necessary, as Apple themselves don't offer any headphones to be paired with the iPod (I'm reffering to wired 3.5mm jack ones).

Given this, it is interesting to see how the market has evolved. There seems to be more DAPs than ever, but the market is also more niche than it ever was.
I was reading this thread on head-fi forum: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/shanling-m9.25819/reviews#review-28419
I'm amazed how luxury some of these devices look, this showing once again what kind of market do most of these DAPs manufacturers target.

I'm curious what the future will reserve us. Will streaming be the final frontier in consumer audio or will there be something else ? How much these niche markets will evolve in a future that's dominated by smart features and convenience ?

As for what you mention in regard to longevity, the older physical formats lasted the longest. As we go closer to present in time, the newer the technology, the less it lasted.
This was likely caused by a very rapid transition to cloud services, which have replaced most of the physical formats.

 

Good riddance to the ipod, never liked them or over priced apple anyway lol

 

From the amount of CDs that turn up in charity shops I guess I am an atypical user hanging onto my physical media. Despite buying the 64GByte iPod touch years ago, the only thing I have used it for is streaming radio programmes, often into a Bluetooth speaker.

I'm certainly not an Apple fanboy, although my iPad is probably my most used gadget (I'm using it to type this). On the DAP front I have more Sonys than Apple, including an NW-A105. I'm just waiting for more affordable 1TByte micro-SD cards. Then I will be able to easily transfer my entire CD collection to it.

Regarding headphones Beats (who still sell wired headphones) is owned by Apple.

You are right about the switch to streaming. From the way things are going it will continue to be a race to the bottom. I wonder if paid for services like Spotify will still be around in 21 years time? Last week a friend who is more into social media asked "Do you get music recommendations in your feed ?". However, in contrast to lots of people she actually bought herself a new HiFi including a £200+ CD player when her old one broke last year.

 

Most members of this forum are atypical usesrs when it comes to physical media, I'm pretty sure about that !

The NW-A105 is a very good DAP, especially with the modded firmware and the removal of output power limitation. As for microSD cards, I think a proper DAP should have 2 slots, but many have just one unfortunately.
As a DAP fan myself, I don't worry too much about the future of this device, but I don't expect it to become mainstream either. Funny thing is many people seem to use a DAP to stream from Spotify and similar services instead of playing local files.

Beats does indeed still sell wired headphones, but AFAIK it's only a single entry level model that is wired only. The rest of them are designed to be used wireless and the jack is more of an afterthought.
I own a pair of much older Beats Studio and even those use an internal amplifier (headphones don't work without it being on), which is adding extra noise that shouldn't be there. Certainly not my favourite pair.
So from my point of view, I wouldn't count the Beats ones, as Apple bought the company specifically to transform their headphones into wireless only. This is understandable, as the market for wireless headphones is worth a couple of dozen bilions USD.

In fact, pretty much every headphone manufacturer has wireless models today, it's just some of them target the professional and audiophile market, while others are foucsed purely on consumer market.
Companies like Bose, for example, don't make wired ones anymore apart from the aviation sets (which I would put in the professional category, despite it's a different kind of professional than studio or DJ use).

I wonder the same about paid services, but given pretty much everything has started to have a subscription nowadays and these companies will have to grow in order to survive, adding even more subscription plans in the future is a possibility.
The biggest problem with streaming services (apart from the obvious privacy one) is you don't have any guarantee if the music will last there or it will be removed at some point. It's all up to how lucrative the contracts with the record labels are.

"Last week a friend who is more into social media asked "Do you get music recommendations in your feed ?" " - it's no surprise that companies like Spotify share your data all over the place, including with potential programs that assess risk scores for citizens.
"in contrast to lots of people she actually bought herself a new HiFi including a £200+ CD player" - glad to hear there are still people like who buy these around. CD players are still a thing fortunately, but I do wonder for how long.

 

Had 2 ipod touch's and never really liked them. Didn't like the proprietary audio filetypes and having to convert to .aiff to get anywhere near close to acceptable PB quality.
Jailbroke both of them in order to get FLACplayer and SDcard (CCK kit) storage working, then it became a bit more user-friendly.
Ditched it altogether many years ago in favour of using my Android phone as a DAP in and subsequently in conjunction with USBAudioPlayerPro and a Chord Mojo and been more than happy with this combination for portable (digital) tuna for the last 5 years.

For tape it's always the D3 or DD33/FiioE12/ATHM50X combo.

I think the Ipods were truly innovative back in the day and the first gen models are still coveted by many but the Touch should have been put out to pasture years ago. I never really understood continuing the market-presence for such an outdated/clunky concept.

For sh!ts, giggles and nostalgia I just cranked up my Gen2 Touch and am actually surprised by how good it sounds with efficient headphones, better than my 5th Gen model!

 

To be honest not a lot of people will miss it, as there are other things that do the exact same job i.e. smart phone. On the other hand when Sony stopped making Walkman, there was nothing else that did the same job.
With regard to wired headphones, many companies still make wired headphones. Most companies may have some wireless headphone in their line-up, but you will find they have more wired than wireless.

 

I wonder if it is age related ? During the 1990s I was buying a couple of full priced CDs a month so my CD collection must have cost a couple of £thousands.

Mine is a Japanese import so doesn't have those limitations.

She is a similar age to me and also has a large CD collection. I suspect CD players will also turn into a niche product. She bought a new HiFi system from UK retailer Richer Sounds as they have a store quite local to here.
https://www.richersounds.com/
Looking at their price list I was surprised to see that their cheapest CD player is over twice the price of a Blu-Ray player. It is a good thing that there are so many devices around that can play CDs, that hopefully there won't be a shortage for the next few decades.

 

It is age related. Most people that are a lot into physical media (especially cassettes and vinyl) were young or very young in the 1980s or 1990s and they want to re-live those moments.

From my own observations, I'm also inclined to believe there are 2 different categories of people: those that are mostly into older music (either which they already own or they want to buy) and people who are into newer music.
People who are into newer music are likely to be younger than those interested in older music. Younger people are not familiar with music of the 60s or 70s for example, but may be more familiar with that of the 90s.
These younger generations, I am tempted to believe, are more open to new music both new genres and new music with similar styles to older music. I may be wrong, this is just an assumption.

Looked at Richer Sounds and I'm quite impressed with how many CD players they have for sale and as you already said none of them are cheap entry-level ones.
Comparing to some local retailers from Romania, I am also quite impressed to see that CD players are indeed still a thing. It certainly seems that Blu-ray players are a lot rarer than CD players actually.

 

For me at least, I'm saddened to see the iPod go. Im not as old as a number of you guys here so I grew up around the iPod. Though I had a cd walkman as a kid, I have very fond memories of my parents iPod's. Listening to their music on their iPods was where I got introduced to music and developed my musical tastes. Was always so envious that they could listen to so much music on one small device. I'm grateful nowadays that they imported all of their music from CD's as opposed to buying from iTunes, as I tend to use Discman's much more often than their iPod's (iTunes is rubbish too). That being said I found their iPods a couple weeks ago and fitted a new battery into them. They don't sound remarkable, especially compared to the formats I listen to for quality (CD's and Hi-Res). But it's an especially nice experience to sit down with one of their iPods and listen to all that music that defined a large part of my boyhood. That being said, I was never a big fan of the iPod touch, and in all reality I mourn the name of the iPod more than I mourn the 'touch'.

 

You might be one of the last people to have that experience.
What will 21 year olds find in 21 years time. A Spotify playlist ? What are the chances that Spotify will have gone the way of MySpace by then anyhow ?

 

yeah, farewell, f***king iPod

even that i have an iPod touch 1st. gen around, i never liked‘em - neither did or do i like any other wav/mp3 or whatever other filebased player. and now most of you guys will laugh at me: i never became friends with iTunes, iPod file-system and and and.
maybe i‘m to old-fashioned, maybe i‘m just ignorant or to stupid for it - i‘ve never been able to use it in the right way, or the way i was and am used to play music. long live physical media, long live vinyl

even though, the iPod deserves its place in music reproducing history, it almost changed worldwide music-listening habits like the first real Walkman did, kudos…

 

In my experience iTunes got worst as it got updated basically turning into a storefront for Apple Music. There was a version that came out three or four years ago that removed so much functionality I restored my PC from a backup (because Apple doesn't let you go backwards) and I have never updated iTunes since.

I do have about 90% of my CDs ripped to .wav format on what is now a Windows 8.1 PC so I can still have Windows Media Center. Microsoft will drop support for Windows 8.1 early next year so I will have to decide what to do then.

Showing my aversion to all the hassle of sorting and syncing files etc I have had my car eight years and driven 85000 miles, yet have never plugged a USB, SD card, or phone into it (which would be difficult considering it has the old 30 pin Apple connector).

In contrast, on Saturday I went into HMV (one of the few remaining media store chains) bought a CD, popped it in the cars CD player (which unhelpfully is in the Glovebox) and was playing it before I left the car park.

 

The bigger issue I see with this is not Spotify itself disappearing (which I am convinced won't happen, of course others are free to have different opinions), but rather those playlists going into oblivion because there are
just too many of them and these platforms are designed so you consume music and forget about it the second after. The business model itself that the streaming platforms have is problematic from many points of view:
- loosing the cultural history of music (music does not remain there forever);
- not paying artists their fair share (I'm talking about small indie ones, not those who publish under SONY Music);
- not owning music (I do consider owning of DRM-free files still owning);
- having your listening patterns tracked to the last click (some might consider this a problem, some might not, everybody's entitled to his/her opinion);

It's interesting to see differences. Some of us only listen to physical media, others like digital files and DAPs as well. I would be curious about one thing: how many of you buy DRM-free music ? (I'm reffering especially to new releases)

 

Saturday's CD was a "best of" by album featuring a couple of new tracks by an artist I didn't have any CDs of.
There was one track (a cover of a well known song) which I had never heard before but which got me turning the volume up and playing several times.

At Christmas I asked for, and received Abba "Voyage". I literally opened it and played it for the first time on Christmas morning.
Go back to the 20th century and that would have been happening (obviously with different artists) in millions of homes across the U.K.
I agree with all your comments about streaming services like Spotify. They dilute the value of recorded music. It used to me said that artists toured to promote their latest album. Now, for many, it is their main source of income.

An item you didn't mention in your list of problems was making the music charts meaningless.
From a U.K. point of view the two highlights of a bands career in the 1970s through 1990s were

• Appearing on national pop TV programme "Top of the Pops" - which could cause their record to go up about ten places in the charts. Belinda Carlisle said a short "What's happening in the US charts" feature on Top of the Pops launched her chart success in the U.K.
• Reaching Number One in the U.K. singles charts (which incidentally was always the last full track played on Top of the Pops. Some well known artists (like Elton John) took a long time to achieve that, or never managed it at all.

Somebody, on a different forum has the great signature "Spotify is killing music : and it's perfectly legal", which for the youngsters is a paraphrase of the record companies "Home taping is killing music: and it's illegal" campaign of the 1980s.

 

I have asked myself a lot of times if this is something good or bad. Have talked with other people about it and opinions are mixed.
From a waste disposal point of view (given the plastic content of CDs), the fact that they make a lot less of them may seem like a good idea. I say "seem" cause I'm not really sure how many of them become waste and how quick.
For example, CDs from the early 2000s with Romanian music (which was highly popular at the time) are so rare now that you're lucky if you find one at 5 times the original retail price. Sometimes you just don't find it at all.
I imagine the ones with more popular artists had similar faith, but the reason they're still available is simply the much higher manufacturing volumes.

From an ownership and customer experience point of view, having them is certainly a good thing. But then you could also have the DRM-free files. Hard to draw an objective conclusion...
And I want to clarify my question: by buying DRM-free music, I intented to reffer mostly to buying digital files, not physical media (cause physical media is DRM-free by default). I ask because I have an impression many/most members don't do this.

I agree about streaming making music charts meaningless. And it's clearly a bad thing as well.

For me, one thing is clear: for the big record labels, the streaming business model is by far the most profitable one. They have always been obssesed with piracy and while in the 80s and 90s we can say there were legitimate reasons to be, nowadays not so much.
Many indie artists sell their DRM-free music (including in flac and wav formats) on bandcamp without fears of piracy. Those who want to support them will do it, those who don't won't buy their music anyway, even if it was protected by DRM.

 

My I-Pod Classic that my wife bought me in Macau back in 2008/2009 or there abouts. Hated it. Hardly ever used it. Had some music down loaded in China but never bothered with it. I just charge it up sometimes and then put it back in the drawer. 120 GB. PS- Don't tell the wife.

 

Ad the fact that apple locked you in so you must pay for mp3's lol...never paid for an mp3 never will lol

 

When iPods were a new thing, I didn't want one, so I chose something different, something that died out much quicker than the iPod. The Microsoft Zune. I bought mine on eBay for around £110, the most expensive thing I'd ever bought online at the time. Mine is a white 30gb gen 1 version. Still use it to this day. Major downside is having to use an old laptop with windows 7 on it, as 10 and above don't support the Zune software anymore. Sounds great, I have a couple of the docking stations I also got from eBay. I now have quite a few iPods, the only one in any massive use is my 5th Gen Nano I keep in one of my cars.

 

The problem I had with the music I requested to be downloaded in China they never did. All I got was some music all in Chinese that I hated. Did try once to connect the I-pod up to a laptop to try and delete the music but could not figure out how to do it. Don't know if it is still possible to delete it.