📝">I Bought a 2004 iPod in 2026 · Chris Collins' Notes
2026·06·18<br>I Bought a 2004 iPod in 2026<br>This week I bought an iPod Classic 4th Generation (Mono) and I’m planning on daily driving it. It might seem a strange thing to do, but hear me out.
It’s 2026 and I’m now 32. Back in 2004 I was 10, and most nights were about playing football in the street after school and messing around with HTML and Dreamweaver in the short windows that I was allowed on the family computer. The iPod wasn’t really on my radar.
In 2009 my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) bought me my first ever iPod as a Christmas present, using one of her first wages from her part-time job. It was an iPod nano, 8GB in blue. I absolutely loved the thing. I carried it everywhere for years and it was the first truly magical tech product I’d ever had, and my first ever Apple product. I still have it (photo below) but the battery is basically dead and they are seemingly one of the worst iPods to even attempt a repair on. It lives on as a sentimental item - I’ll not part with it.
My iPod Nano 8GB in blue — © Chris Collins, 2026<br>I started working part time in 2010 while at Uni and spent a lot of time on trains and walking to and from them, so at some point between 2012-13 I got an iPod Classic 7th Gen. I used it for years before jumping onto the Spotify bandwagon around 2017.
Fast forward to late 2019, I got a new job and was commuting by train again. I started to miss my iPod for reasons I couldn’t quite place. At first I thought it was sound quality, or being fed up with subscriptions, so I bought a Sony Walkman NW-A45 and loaded some FLACs and all was good for a while. Eventually I came to realise I didn’t enjoy using it. The UI wasn’t my style and it was touchscreen, so I felt I was carrying around an additional smaller phone at times. It fell out of favour and back to Spotify I went.
When Covid hit in 2020, I picked up my iPod Classic again. I had time, I was working from home and the whole lockdown situation meant I could spend some time doing something I didn’t realise I loved. I started curating my music collection again - for my iPod.
It’s weird, but the way the iPod and the whole syncing process works makes you really care about your collection. The metadata, album art and the overall “I own this collection” feeling is something else. Once it’s sync’d you can hold your music collection in a beautiful product that is completely ergonomically designed to be used one-handed and controlled with your thumb. No internet, no ads, no subscriptions - a time capsule since the last time you sync’d.
Ok, so it’s clear that I’m very happy with my iPod Classic, so why on earth “downgrade” to an older model, and one without a colour screen? I’ll start off by saying I’m not replacing my 7th generation but I wanted to try something that had already superseded me by the time I was in the market. There were two big selling points for me: the mono screen, and the repair/upgradability.
A few years ago I bought a pocket Sony DAB+ radio (Sony XDR-P1DBP). It does one thing very well. The small screen is a pixel LCD display with no bells and whistles but it functions exactly like you’d expect without any issues. The pixel display and the utility of it was a pro, not a con.
The Sony XDR-P1DBP pixel LCD display — © Chris Collins, 2026<br>When I started looking into iPods out of curiosity I was drawn to the mono screen of the 4th gen. The ergonomics are almost identical to the Classic but the simplicity of the UI is everything, and apparently better for battery life. I started down the rabbit hole of the iPod modding communities. Most are geared towards 5.5 onwards but there’s some nods to the 4th gen in terms of being one of the easiest to open and replace parts. You can replace the battery with a simple set of tools, you can flash mod it for more storage and a lighter, faster experience. For someone who came into technology when colour screens were the norm, I have a real desire for simplicity, utility and single-function devices. They don’t exist very often nowadays.
So here I am, with a £30 iPod Classic 4th Generation from eBay. It arrived full of music, hadn’t been synced since August 2006 and belonged to someone called “Muck”. The device name simply read: “MUCKS IPOD”.
Naturally, before restoring it, I ripped the music from it and had a look through. That felt oddly fitting given everything I’ve written above. Twenty years later, someone else’s carefully curated music collection was still sitting there, untouched.
It feels nice, owning something that was already out of fashion by the time I was in a position to buy it. The fundamental learning is that it’s still working and doing its thing. I’ve replaced the battery for £8.99. Beyond that I can polish the front, flash mod it, and generally own it for a long time. Officially supported or not, it was built in a way that wasn’t hostile to being “supported” by the consumer, which is really nice.
Anyway,...