Touching the back wall of the Apple store

+1 for the mention of Zune. I started with a Zune, a bright green and brown one, then went to iPods. Like the author and their first Walmart MP3 player, my first MP3 player, my Zune, left a much bigger impression on me than all of my later iPods. I think there's an alternate history where Zune, with all of its weird personalization and oddness, won out over iPod's sleek luxury. In some ways I think that that alternate reality might have been a bit more fun.

iPods got out of the way and could be used in your pocket

I got a Zune and immediately realized MS had no idea why people liked the iPod

Different folks like different things, but I don't think a big menu of lowercase text is more fun than the iPod in any of its variations

That's reasonable. iPod was probably a better product overall, but I think Zune had more character. In Starcraft terms, I'd say that iPod was the pure Protoss and Zune was the primal Zerg. I guess I'd rather live on a Protoss world, but you can't deny that it'd be interesting to visit a Zerg one.

Great analogy! I still use my iPod, because for whatever reason the OG battery hasn't died even though it is a FireWire model. It also, shockingly, sounds WAY better with any pair of decent headphones than any of my AirPods including the Max.

Not a fair comparison since a wire will always have more bandwidth for fidelity, but the difference in listening experience on an old iPod vs a modern iPhone is so shocking I find that modern iPhone listening is like diet soda and is somewhat unfulfilling (I have Apple Lossless turned on, but the sound chip + low power of modern headphones + no wired connection... loses something)

I don't mean in a "vinyl is better" sense... I mean, everyone I've demo'd this to has looked at me with big eyes when they put the iPod on and listen to the same song vs. the same headphones plugged into a modern phone. It's weird, especially since the iPods of this era can't do anything close to Lossless... they're 160-192k AACs so the limited RAM cache can play a full song without pausing on an old iPod.

The early iPods had _really good_ DACs. Do some reading up on on them.