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Buying An iPod in 2025: How It Transformed My Music Experience 🎵
How a 16-year-old, $100 iPod made me cancel my Apple Music subscription and enjoy music the old-fashioned way.
Non-Members can read this story here.
“But the biggest thing about the iPod is that it holds 1,000 songs. Now, this is a quantum leap because, for most people, it’s their entire music library. This is huge.”
~ Apple co-founder Steve Jobs during the iPod launch in 2001.
I was under six months old when the iPod launched, so I missed the hype around this personal music player as I was growing up. However, on my ninth birthday, I got a 4th Generation iPod Touch as a gift. I was so clueless about its purpose that I didn’t care when my older brother took it away and used it as his own. Until much later, I didn’t realize it was a music player. The iPod had changed so much by then that it looked just like an iPhone, only without a camera or SIM.
That was the first Apple product I ever saw and used. I remember my brother jailbreaking it with Cydia. He taught me how to sync pirated movies on the 8GB model. We…