Music Geeks Are Retrofitting Old iPods to Keep the Perfect MP3 Player Alive

Music Geeks Are Retrofitting Old iPods to Keep the Perfect MP3 Player Alive


Apple hasn’t sold the iPod Classic since September 2014, when it trimmed the iPod lineup down to the iPod Touch, iPod Nano, and iPod Shuffle. The message from Apple was clear: the iPod, that famously “perfect thing” that was designed to hold your music library in your pocket, no longer made sense in a world where when tens of millions of songs were now merely an app away.

But for some music fans, the high cost of mobile data, and a desire to have their whole library on their person at all times, has them returning to the old standby.

A quick search on eBay finds several vendors selling refurbished models of old iPods that include brand new batteries and storage drives. The drives in these refurbished models, which tend to go for around $300 to $400, are typically high-capacity solid state drives (SSDs) with as much as 256GB of space—enough for more than 50,000 songs encoded at typical bitrates.