Although I can see them selling an original 2007 iPhone Anniversary Edition, fully upgraded under the hood and with a modern screen/camera/wifi/5G
But I'm only saying that because I don't like giant phones: I'm in the 2% minority.
I’d even settle for Apple opening up the Music app so I can upload music to my iPhone from Linux. But once again, that doesn’t make the spreadsheet sparkle.
I have a local collection of over 30,000 mp3s, about half of which is not 'matched', and a sizable chunk of which is not available on streaming anywhere, and I have it on all my devices seamlessly, included with the price of an Apple Music subscription. (which I also use for convenience for listening to things I don't have my own copy of yet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Anniversary_Edition_2...
The ghost of Steve Jobs has spoken.
Steve Jobs famously launched the smartphone industry as "We are launching three things: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. It is one device, and we are calling it iPhone." Not having to carry a whole bunch of separate devices on a day-to-day basis was groundbreaking, and it was immediately clear that the synergy between the until-now separate features would open up a lot of new possibilities.
But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.
Sure, the market for a modern iPod refresh might not be gigantic, but I reckon it is definitely larger than the market for Apple Vision, or Meta's pervert glasses. The demand exists, the question is just whether it is large enough for Apple to care - especially when it means undermining their own golden goose app ecosystem.
Right. The Jobs vision was still an accessory. An advanced and staggeringly capable one, but an accessory nonetheless. It hadn't yet become an inescapable, addictively-designed pillar of daily life.
People are also coming back around to the idea that convenience isn't the only thing that matters and that a "split device" lifestyle can even provide hobbies with associated communities for those who partake. Curating a music collection comes naturally after picking up a dedicated offline music player and getting into photography more seriously follows buying an old secondhand standalone digital camera, for example.
That would make a damn nice 149$ apple music machine, slap some stripped down firmware on it, so they can argue why it only supports apple music streaming.
I'm more into 6th and 7th gen iPods. These unforunately are missing the iconic click wheel in favor of a tiny touch screen. The 7th gen even has Bluetooth 4.0.
Trying to build one myself[1] with Linux, Rust/Slint and 3d printing made me realise what an engineering effort it took to build a device running more than 12 hours of music playback with a 220mah battery supporting ui animations - all that more than 12 years ago. My nanowave approach draws ~330ma, which would require a 2000mah battery to run 6h from full to dead.
I'm in the process of analyzing the TinyEmbedded Dual[2] to have better efficiency as my current solution (LicheeRV Nano) but progress is painfully slow because i have pretty much no free time and have to learn 3d printing, PCB design and Rust at the same time.
However, I think today it would be possible to build an iPod at home if you have the knowledge and time. Probably you're better off just using a HiBy R1 (which uses Linux under the hood, I already managed to compile my Rust/Slint player for it)[3]
1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui
2: https://github.com/yuansco/TinyEmbedded-Dual
3: https://github.com/yetisoldier/Hiby-R1-Audiobook-Mod/issues/...
What would be great is to change to a custom PCB with USB-C and an OLED display. Not sure how Nano 3G case can be made to work with USB-C though.
For software I was quite happy with Rockbox on my bigger Classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtYlUcelBuc
Should also work on the Nano 3g
Glad to report that Finder still works great syncing music all the way back to the launch day Shuffle, and even iPhone 3G, which I did just yesterday.
It obviously can't hold a charge anymore and every time i reach for it i'm praying it still works
The NOP thing was predictable. Qemu is not great at limiting itself to actual requested emulated hardware, often allowing supersets of instruction sets and abilities.
And NAND....is always unnecessarily exciting.
The author described in details how to attach a 500GB IDE drive to an original ipod, with all the required schematics, process to open the device, where to solder, etc, everything. It was the first article I ever read on Uncyclopedia, so I wasn't expecting the kicker: a photo of the modded ipod, hold together with elastic bands and a graph comparing playing time: from 8 hours to 12 seconds, or something like that. Boy, that was a good laugh.
Edit: I can't open the original article, but it seems it was an iPod nano and a 200GB hard drive: https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/IPod_Nano_200gb_Instructions.
Do some nice nostalgia marketing for the zoomers and people that had one back in the day and it would sell like hotcakes.