Today’s old hardware is a 4th generation iPod Touch…
While I don’t have my original ‘click wheel’ iPod anymore, I do still have my original 2005 iPod Shuffle and this 2010 iPod Touch – and they both still work!
The 4th generation touch came out in late 2010, and I picked this one up for Christmas that year. It’s the smaller of the offerings and only holds 8gigs – but with even high bitrate AAC that was enough space for a couple of days of music.
I also spent quite a few hours playing some physics-based puzzler on this thing, and probably got my money’s worth from that alone. 🙂
Like the rest of my antiques, the Touch is in great shape both mechanically and physically… For example, here’s the back of it:
Apple went away from polished stainless steel eventually, because while they look great initially, they’re usually a cloudy mass of scratches in pretty short order. Mine lives in a small velvet bag when I’m not playing with it just to maintain the shiny.
Overall the iPod still works well and sounds great! But it doesn’t work with Apple’s newer offerings such as the cloud-based subscription service that renders iTunes into a radio station where you call the shots. So the only music on this iPod is stuff I’ve purchased in past.
It came with iOS 4.1, but currently runs iOS 6.1.6, which is the last version of the OS Apple made for it. So while you can press buttons and it will ‘do stuff’, nothing is of much use. The weather app used to connect to Yahoo – and that stopped working a few years back, and several other apps are in the same boat where they attempt to connect to services that no longer exist… But it still plays music, and that’s good enough for me.
One last picture of the old OS, just for posterity:
Listening to "Victoria" by Ollie Wride