Who remembers the games that shipped with classic iPods? You could have a pixel war in Parachute, smash blocks in Brick, play cards in Solitaire, and test your knowledge of your own iPod’s library with Music Quiz. Of course, Apple has since discontinued the iPod, but they seem to have trouble letting go of the past. Music Quiz lives on as a hidden iPhone game.
The hidden music quiz hasn’t been around forever, but isn’t all that new either. Apple first added it to the iPhone not as a game but as a shortcut, back in 2020 with iOS 14. The game was part of a small series of “Starter Shortcuts”—the idea, I assume, was to offer users a quick look at what was possible with shortcuts (even though the app launch two years prior with iOS 12). Either way, it doesn’t seem to have been a wholly effective marketing campaign—I had no idea this music quiz existed. It’s just the kind of hidden feature that’s a pleasant surprise to discover.
How to play Apple’s hidden Music Quiz on your iPhone
If you haven’t deleted any shortcuts from your iPhone before, Music Quiz should be on your device right now. To find it, you can swipe down on the home screen or lock screen to pull up a spotlight search, type “Music Quiz,” then tap the purple music icon that appears. You can also find it in the Shortcuts app in the “Starter Shortcuts” folder, or by searching for Music Quiz if you deleted it in the past.
To play the game, you’ll need to add songs to your Music library. Any songs will work, whether you bought them from iTunes, imported them from your library, or downloaded them from Apple Music. Music Quiz will randomly pull songs from your library for a five-round game. The game will play one song per round, and you’ll need to guess which it is from the song titles that Music Quiz offers you.
Screenshot: Jake Peterson
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Super stylish STEM learning. These Mann Magnets Gear Toys are a simple and stylish way for kids to learn to problem solve in a STEM setting. With this set, kids can group and design, creating more complex gears as they learn.
For any Shortcuts tinkerers out there, take a look at how intricate this simple game is. You can see the entire build of the shortcut by tapping the (•••) icon on the Music Quiz tile. Apple certainly took some time to build the game. Too bad not many people seem to know about it.
DataPlay: The futuristic optical disc format that time forgot
In the early 2000s, there were serious efforts to find the next technological breakthrough that would succeed the CD. One of those was the DataPlay, a miniaturized version of a CD with a 32mm diameter. Why use DataPlay instead of CD? For one, it could store more than just music—artist interviews, music videos, and pre-recorded songs could be accessed when connected to a PC. It was also adorable tiny, or as The New York Times put it, “about the size of the ing in the center of a CD.”
After winning the CES Best of Show award in 2001, the DataPlay was released in 2002 and was quickly backed by artists and recording studios due to its strict digital rights management system. Britney Spears’ album Britney and re-releases from ‘N Sync, Pink, Usher, OutKast, Sarah McLachlan, and Brooks & Dunn were included in the first batch of DataPlay discs.
In the end, DataPlay failed and is now an all-but-forgotten format. It was too expensive, forced owners to purchase new music players, and locked down content in a way customers weren’t used to at the time. It also arrived during the growth of digital media.
Gizmodo had a feeling DataPlay wouldn’t be successful:
Let’s see, they’ll cost more than CDs, be difficult to copy, sound about the same as CDs, and require a whole new player (of which only one is available, the iRiver IDP-100, pictured at right). Sure to be a huge hit.
Apple earlier this week announced the discontinuation of the iPod touch, and because it was the last iPod still available for purchase, its sunsetting effectively marks the end of the entire iPod lineup.
To send the iPod on its way, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the most notable iPod releases over the last 21 years.
Original iPod (2001)
Introduced in October 2001, the original iPod was introduced as a device that put 1,000 songs in your pocket. It became one of Apple’s most iconic and well-known products, and is one of the devices responsible for skyrocketing Apple back to success.
The original iPod offered a hard drive with 5GB of storage space and a Scroll Wheel that physically turns, and it remains the only iPod with this design. It also featured a FireWire port to connect to a Mac, and it sold for $399. Apple followed the original iPod with an almost identical second-generation model in 2002 that featured a capacitive-sensing Touch Wheel with click buttons around the sides, and a third-generation model added an even more refined Touch Wheel with buttons above. The third-generation iPod also added a Dock Connector.
With the fourth-generation model that came out in 2004, Apple introduced the Click Wheel, an iteration of the Touch Wheel that also incorporated the buttons. The fourth-generation model is notable because Apple continued to use the Click Wheel for years to come.
The iPod photo with its color display followed the fourth-generation model later in 2004, and Apple expanded the color display to all models in 2005 with the iPod with color display. Both of these were considered part of the fourth-generation lineup.
Apple added video capabilities in 2005 with the fifth-generation iPod, and this was also the first iPod that came in black aside from the special black and red U2 edition of the iPod.
After the iPod video, Apple introduced the iPod classic, and several versions came out in 2007, 2008, and 2009, all of which were similar in design. The 2009 iPod classic was Apple’s final iPod at the size, and it featured a 160GB hard drive, a Click Wheel, and a widescreen color display. It stuck around until it was discontinued in 2014.
iPod mini (2004)
Apple’s first iPod mini came out in 2004, and it was much smaller in size than the standard iPod. It came in several fun colors that include yellow, blue, pink, and gold, and it had a standard Click Wheel.
The iPod mini didn’t stick around for long, and while there was a second-generation version in 2005, it was discontinued after that in favor of the iPod nano.
iPod nano (2005)
Replacing the iPod mini, the iPod nano is one of Apple’s most interesting iPods because of the many major design iterations that it saw over the years.
Apple started out with a slim, aluminum-colored iPod with a Click Wheel, a color screen, and flash memory that allowed Apple to cut down on the size. The nano was replaced in 2006 with the second-generation version that had more rounded edges, a smaller form factor, and bright aluminum colors.
For the third-generation iPod nano that came out in 2007, Apple went in an entirely different direction, and this nano was colloquially known as the iPod nano “fatty.” It had a wider, squatter body with a wider display, and it came in several color options.
The nano fatty only lasted for one year before being replaced with the once-again slimmed down fourth-generation iPod nano, which came in a whole rainbow of colors. It got a taller screen, a curved front, and an accelerometer for the “Shake” feature that let you shake an iPod to shuffle songs.
Apple’s 2009 fifth-generation iPod nano was similar to the fourth-generation model, but had a taller screen and it gained a camera and a microphone. It also came in glossier colors, but Apple kept the wide array of color options.
The nano got a major design overhaul in 2010 with the sixth-generation version that was just a screen in a square-shaped body. It used a multi-touch display instead of a Click Wheel, and this is the version that people attached watch straps to, making it something of a precursor to the Apple Watch.
Apple changed the design in 2012 with the seventh-generation iPod nano, reverting to the rectangular shape but leaving the multi-touch display in place. The nano from this era looked similar to a tinier iPod touch, featuring a Home button and support for multiple apps. The seven-generation iPod nano got new colors in 2015 before being discontinued in 2017.
iPod shuffle (2005)
Apple’s first iPod shuffle was introduced in 2005 ahead of the second-generation iPod mini, and it looked a lot like an Apple TV Remote. It was Apple’s first iPod with no display, featuring nothing but a control pad in order to keep the size down, plus it doubled as a flash drive.
The second-generation iPod shuffle got a significant redesign in 2006, and Apple shrunk it to about half the size of the original and added a belt clip. It was advertised as the world’s smallest MP3 player at the time, and there was even a little iPod shuffle dock for charging it up through the headphone jack. It launched in silver, but Apple eventually came out with additional colors like pink, blue, green, and orange.
The iPod shuffle got yet another redesign in 2009, with Apple adding a voice feature that let it speak the names of songs and albums aloud using text-to-speech. This is the model where Apple did away with the on-device controls, instead using headphones with an attached remote for playback.
In 2010, Apple decided no on-device controls was a bad idea, introducing the fourth-generation iPod shuffle. The fourth-generation model was the last iPod shuffle, featuring bright colors, a smaller chassis, and the return of the Control Pad.
The iPod Shuffle didn’t receive any other design updates, though Apple did introduce new colors in 2015. It was ultimately discontinued in 2017.
iPod touch (2007)
The first iPod touch came out in 2007 alongside the iPhone, and it was a more affordable iPhone alternative that did not have cellular capabilities. It looked a lot like an iPhone with a 3.5-inch multi-touch display, and it came with WiFi support, Safari integration, and apps like YouTube, Mail, Maps, and Weather.
The second and third-generation iPod touch models had the same design, but when the iPhone 4 came out in 2010, Apple also redesigned the iPod touch to have a similar look. It included a front-facing FaceTime camera, a rear camera, and support for iMessage, plus it came in black or white.
Apple redesigned the iPod touch again in 2012, and the fifth-generation model had a larger display and a thinner body, plus it was the first iPod touch to come in bright colors. It was released alongside the iPhone 5 as a pocketable computer with an A5 chip.
After the fifth-generation iPod touch, the design didn’t change, but Apple introduced a sixth-generation model in 2017 and a seventh-generation model in 2019, both with updated chips. After the 2019 release of the seventh-generation iPod touch, the device went without an update for three years until its discontinuation earlier this week.
iPod Replacements
Apple said that it decided to sunset the iPod lineup because the iPod’s capabilities are now built into every Apple device, from the iPhone and the iPad to the Mac, Apple TV, HomePod, and Apple Watch.
Almost every modern Apple device supports the Apple Music service that Apple introduced in 2015, and it is also available on the web, on Android devices, and more, making the iPod superfluous. Apple is selling the iPod touch while supplies last, but it is already sold out in the United States.
You may still be able to find an iPod touch from a third-party retailer, but make sure to act quick because they’re selling out quickly as people aim to get one of the last available iPods.
Pour one out for every kid who one-strapped a backpack in middle school, as they’re likely in mourning today. With Apple’s discontinuation of the 7th-generation iPod Touch, announced yesterday, it’s official: the iPod is dead.
Ostensibly, the iPod was a music device, meant to digitize song libraries and move listeners away from the limitations and galactically better sound quality of physical media. (Whether such a shift was good for the music industry is, of course, another story.) But over its many iterations, the iPod also heralded another revolution: that of mobile gaming.
Once upon a time, mobile gaming consisted of playing Brick or Snake on your parents’ dusty Nokia. And sure, following its 2001 launch, the iPod—which literally featured a shoddy port of Brick following the device’s 2001 launch—had a similar landscape for a while. Over the next few years, the offerings grew, but not by much. In 2006, EA released iPod versions of minted classics like Sudoku and Solitaire. Kaplan, the for-profit educational behemoth, released a series of SAT prep study courses (to which I can only say: lol). Compared to other mobile gaming devices of the era, like, say, the Nintendo DS, the iPod was hardly revolutionary.
Then came the iPod Touch.
First released in 2007, the iPod Touch totally reimagined the iPod’s design. Rather than a brick with a wonkily controlled track wheel, the iPod Touch looked a lot like its contemporary, the iPhone: sleek, rectangular, affixed with a glass touch screen that coated its entire silhouette. Unlike the iPhone, you couldn’t use an iPod Touch to summon and instantly lose the courage to dial up your crush from algebra. But if you had a Wifi connection, you could download a bunch of games that’d at least distract you during algebra.
And some of the games of the era were truly excellent. Fruit Ninja! Tap Tap Revenge! Words with Friends! Temple Run practically created, or at least widely popularized, a new genre, laying the groundwork for truly terrific endless runners like Alto’s Odyssey. Personally, I had a soft spot for Doodle Jump, a platformer that cast you as an elephant (?) wearing a jetpack. The visuals, stylized to look like a lined paper notebook, are inked in memory. But for me, at least, it was also an early introduction to the wider world of leaderboards.
Some games, quality aside, went on to become legit cultural behemoths. Angry Birds spawned a feature film, along with crossovers with Star Wars and Transformers, and a gazillion other spin-offs. (My grandmother once bought me an Angry Birds bath mat, presuming that, seeing as I like video games, I must like Angry Birds, the only video game.) The impact was undeniable.
Raise your hand if these ads left an indelible impact on you, too.
And so, news of the iPod’s death set off a spirited wave of nostalgia in Kotaku’s Slack this afternoon.
Staff editor Lisa Marie Segarra shouted out pretty much all of the games listed above, and further pointed to the iPod as a catalyst for the indisputable Candy Crush craze. She also praised the tilt controls that came with some games, which were “so innovative at the time. Or at least it felt like it.”
“What a time to be alive,” added staff writer Zack Zwiezen. “I truly miss the older era of the App Store. … No doubt we have great stuff today, but I can’t help but long for those simpler times when I drank fake beer and played with knock-off lightsaber apps.”
The times are indeed less simple. Rather than the handful of must-play options, Apple’s gaming ecosystem is bigger than ever, as major games—everything from blockbusters like XCOM and Genshin Impact to indie sleeper hits like Sayonara Wild Hearts and Baba is You—make their way to the App Store. Apple Arcade, a subscription service that grants access to a library of games, is slowly becoming an essential scouting ground for under-the-radar gems. (Many Apple Arcade games eventually make their way to Nintendo Switch or traditional consoles, where they become ‘legitimized’ in the eyes of the hardcore player, something that goes on to obscure mobile game origins.)
But every time one of these once-essential devices gasps its final breath, I find myself struck at the finality—how everything, no matter its apparent staying power or cultural impact, is ephemeral, a fleeting moment you don’t realize was fleeting until it’s gone. As they say: Wouldn’t it be nice to recognize you’re living in the good times when you’re actually living in the good times? I think so.
Anyway, yeah, RIP to the iPod. You had a good run. You’ve left a good legacy. And to really get all mid-2000s: Thnks fr th Mmrs.
My first was white, boxy, in a rubbery blue case. My second, silver. My third, pink – and that was a Shuffle, barely the size of my thumb, so it’s lost somewhere in the house. If my child finds it, even though he has his own old and cracked Touch model, I’m not sure he’ll know what it is. It’s the Apple iPod and it’s dead.
Over two decades ago, the first iPod, the portable music player from Apple, was introduced. Apple has announced the last remaining model, the iPod Touch, will be its swan song; it’s discontinuing the product. With no new models planned, the iPod Touch will be available for sale only “while supplies last,” as The Verge reported.
RELATED: Apple finally admits its products are difficult to repair
Trust the shuffle, my friends would say. We used the random function as a kind of oracle.
When the first iPod came on the market in 2001, it was a remarkable device, capable of storing 1,000 songs, which seemed like a lot. No longer did you need to cart around dozens of CDs in heavy binders, their plastic cases always shattering or needing bulky storage, or to carefully choose only a selection of CDs before car trips (hope you’re happy listening to David Bowie for eight hours!). The iPod meant you could take your whole music library with you at all times.
It also meant your library – even your musical tastes — might expand. You didn’t have to buy a whole CD or even EP to take a chance on a new band. You could download a single song. You could carry it with you and live with it for a while. You could download tunes from bands that didn’t even have an album yet or that never would (Agatha Parker Sterling, I’ve never forgotten you).
The iPod, as Greg Joswiak, the senior vice-president of worldwide marketing at Apple, said to the BBC, “redefined how music [was] discovered, listened to, and shared.” It helped power the digital music boom, which was already exploding.
MP3.com had been founded in 1997, with Napster, the popular file-sharing site, starting two years later. In 2003, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store, soon responsible for 70% of sales of digital music. You could download music legally (MP3.com, Napster and other file-downloading sites were ordered to shut down or to reinvent themselves without copyright infringement). Bandcamp came on the scene in 2008, envisioned as a site where bands and indie musicians could legally sell their music digitally straight to fans.
The shuffle function of iPods acquired their own kind of cult following, the device choosing songs at random. Trust the shuffle, my friends would say. The shuffle knows what you need to hear better than you do. We used the random function as a kind of oracle, a spin-the-wheel of musical signs. One model of the iPod called the Shuffle did not allow users to choose songs at all or even to see their titles, lacking a screen. The Shuffle was the smallest model of iPod and the first one to use flash memory.
As technology becomes obsolete, it becomes nostalgic too: longing – not exactly for a device, but for a time.
Despite selling about 450 million devices, Apple iPods were not able to withstand the test of phones. It’s a tough argument to carry two devices around when one, the almighty smart phone, ever slimmer and more powerful, can do everything, including play and store music. Those of us who resisted smart phones for a time (raises hand) may have helped keep the iPod fires burning. I also had iPods that outlasted computers, putting me in the uncomfortable digital situation of having music on my music player that didn’t live anywhere else.
In recent years, the iPod Touch enjoyed a renaissance of sorts with parents as a kind of starter device that played music, had games and allowed children to text and communicate with their families without giving kids the full power of the internet in their pocket. It was a gateway phone, the first device I bought my son. I didn’t want to buy him a phone-phone, but during the pandemic, I realized the urgency of my child having a way to contact me. Because of the iPod, he played Bad Religion over and over again, and first learned how to use some texting abbreviations I don’t understand.
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I’m weirdly sad to see the iPod go. Like dial-up internet, like a time without internet, it feels like a part of childhood is going too, an innocence connected both to cumbersome, early technology and the excitement of discovery – the freedom I felt when I could travel with just a slim vessel of tunes.
I remember my silver iPod kept freezing, and I learned a hack where I had to keep toggling the on/off tab while pressing two buttons at once. This seemed perfectly fine to me, worth it for such magic. As technology becomes obsolete, it becomes nostalgic too: longing – not exactly for a device, but for a time. When we didn’t have everything at our fingertips, when we didn’t know everything, either; when some things were as mysterious as what song would play next.
May 10 (Reuters) – Apple Inc (AAPL.O) is discontinuing the iPod more than 20 years after the device became the face of portable music and kickstarted its meteoric evolution into the world’s biggest company.
The iPod Touch, the only version of the portable music player still being sold, will be available till supplies last, Apple said in a blog post on Tuesday.
New Apple iPod Nanos are seen during an unveiling in San Francisco, California September 5, 2007. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
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Since its launch in 2001, the iPod took on a storm of competing music players before being eclipsed by smartphones, online music streaming and within the Apple pantheon, by the rise of the iPhone.
The iPod has undergone several iterations since its inception featuring a scroll wheel, the capacity to store a 1,000 songs and a 10-hour battery-life. The version that has been carried till date – the iPod Touch – was launched in 2007, the same year as the iPhone.
Apple stopped reporting iPod sales in 2015.
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Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Apple’s first fashion-forward gadget is making a comeback. The second generation iPod shuffle introduced a little over 15 years ago is seeing a resurgence in popularity on none other than TikTok. The second, third, and fourth generation iPod shuffles all had built-in clips and came in a wide variety of color options making them easily wearable. TikTok is known for being a launchpad for trends just like this so it doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. As noted by The Information, the iPod shuffle isn’t alone in seeing such an uplift in popularity. Other retro gadgets are also making a comeback led by millennials.
A few weeks back, TikTokers started sharing clips wearing the second generation iPod shuffle as a hair-clip. They’ve been using them both as standalone fashion accessories and as music players with wired earbuds. Wired earbuds are also making a comeback, which we shared more about back in November. A quick search on TikTok yields tons of results showing users accessorizing with old iPod shuffles. The first video to hit the social network from @sailorkiki has now racked up more than 2 million views and nearly 350,000 likes. But the hair-clip trend isn’t the only one that’s increasing the popularity of the iPod shuffle.
According to Newsweek, millennials on TikTok are also sharing funny clips of the iPod shuffle, claiming not to know what it is. The jokes have seemingly triggered older TikTokers, highlighting a rather hilarious generational gap. There’s no question that older Apple products, particularly iPods, have seen a high level of interest as nostalgia for them grows.
Like the hair-clip TikTok video, the jokey millennial one has racked up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
Apple retired the iPod shuffle in 2017, so it has only been off the market for 5 years. But the iPod shuffle model that appears to be making the rounds primarily is the second generation. The pastel colors from September 2007 seem to be the most popular at the moment with the more vibrant tones from early 2007 and late 2008 taking a back seat.
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The Spotify Car Thing looks super cute, but it is not the end-all be-all to my car’s infotainment issue!Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
I love my old car. It’s officially a teenager—13, to be exact—but its in-dash entertainment setup makes it seem a whole lot older. For the longest time, I’ve been using the Android Auto app on my smartphone as my car’s “infotainment” system. Years ago, I yanked out the 30-pin proprietary iPod hookup in my glovebox to expose the AUX port, then later bought a Roav Bolt with the Google Assistant built in for hands-free connectivity.
Everything worked so well. I’d start up the car, my Android phone would connect via Bluetooth to the Bolt, and the Android Auto app would appear on my phone screen. Then, I’d hitch the Popsocket to its holder and tap the play button on the phone to get started on the road. Android Auto offered the perfect marriage of music playback and Google Maps, which I constantly need because I have no sense of direction even after living in the San Francisco Bay Area all my life.
But then Google announced that its Android Auto phone app would be phased out, and I started to panic. That’s when I looked into Spotify’s Car Thing, a Bluetooth accessory for your phone that plays music. I wasn’t quite sure what I expected from this $80 device that exists solely to stream Spotify—surely there was more to it, I thought. Reader, there is not.
An iPod, but Make It Spotify
Car Thing fits squarely into your air vent with a magnetized adapter. Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
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I’ve been a Spotify Premium user since its early days. My algorithm has become finely tuned to the many stages of my life these past 10 years, and I feel intricately locked into my Spotify profile—the same way a person might have felt with their curated CD mixes and iTunes playlists back in the day.
This is why I thought I would benefit from Spotify’s Car Thing. It’s a thing for a service I’ve been paying for nearly 10 years. Spotify requires you to sign up for an invite list to get the chance to buy Car Thing, so I did. About a month later, I got approved and smashed the buy button.
The Car Thing mounts to any air vent with a strong magnet, though there is a CD slot insert included if you’d rather mount it that way. The device has a 3.97-inch display, which isn’t much bigger than my first Android phone, the HTC Incredible. It also has a giant rotating dial in the right-hand corner and a small button on the bottom. It’s powered up via USB-C through your car’s 12V socket with a USB-A adapter, which includes an extra USB slot in the adapter for charging your phone. There are also five additional buttons at the top of the Car Thing that serve a navigational function. I’ll get to that in a minute.
To its credit, Spotify made a display that’s easy to see even in the glare of the sun. The screen automatically brightens and dims, just as your instrument panel would.
A Remote for Your Music
Car Thing can take you through your latest playlists, artists, and even your favorite podcasts. Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
To set up the Spotify Car Thing, you’ll need to connect your device through your car’s speakers. Some newer cars sport Bluetooth, which makes it easy (nice for those people). But my car only has AUX, so whenever I want to take a drive with the Car Thing, I have to physically plug in a headphone adapter to the AUX cable snaked out of my glove compartment before I can take off. It adds minutes to my drive time that I would rather not deal with and almost entirely turns me off to this gadget.
Nevertheless, I persisted. Spotify Car Thing and I took several drives together throughout the Bay Area. Over the course of a 100 miles or so, I found I liked having the app I use second most often front and center while behind the wheel. But once you’re driving and you decide to change up the vibe, the Car Thing suddenly feels too complicated to use. You have to really trust Spotify to deliver the playlist you want before hitting the road.
Those four buttons on top I mentioned before? They’re shortcuts that can be customized so that if there’s a playlist you update frequently—mine is called Everyday I’m Shufflin’—you can pin that. You can also pin a favorite podcast (have you heard of Gadgettes?). By default, Spotify leads you to a list of playlists. I was met with playlists for a commute, but I work from home and only use my car to drive around town running errands, so those playlists aren’t for me.
The most frustrating part of Car Thing is that the volume dial isn’t intuitive to use while you’re rocking out to a playlist. Because I listen through the AUX in my car, the volume is already the loudest it can go. And if I want to shuffle through songs, it takes two clicks of the back button to activate the mode that scrolls through the playlist. Annoyingly, I can’t even use it to skip to the next song, which would be a much easier mechanism than tapping the screen. It’s a tricky balancing act when attempting to steer the car down the freeway.
Spotify does have a digital assistant of sorts. You can say, “Hey Spotify” to skip a song or queue up a particular album. To its credit, it’s been the only assistant thus far to understand when I ask it to play my “Everyday I’m Shufflin’” playlist. The Google Assistant constantly struggles with that particular task, and it was nice to see Spotify’s assistant was capable behind the wheel, which is the one place I really rely on that kind of hands-free interaction.
You can turn off the microphone if you don’t want to use Spotify’s assistant. The ability is available in the settings panel, which you access through the fifth end button on top of the device (on the same row as the presets).
I use Spotify for music but not for podcasts, and unfortunately that means I can’t use Car Thing to listen to my favorites. Car Thing stays dormant if you want to pipe in podcasts from a third-party app on your phone (and the same thing for music, though if you bought Car Thing presumably you stream on Spotify already). Since I had my phone physically tethered to the car’s speakers, I could still listen to my Pocket Casts downloads without any interruption. You’ll have to do that manually, so it’s one of those things you’d have to pull over and manage if you wanted to do that safely.
All About Spotify
Unfortunately, Car Thing did not fix my problems. When using it, I drive with two devices mounted against my vents. Very futuristic! Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
My biggest annoyance with this accessory is that it doesn’t do everything I need it to. Car Thing is merely a Bluetooth accessory for your phone to play back your Spotify library, and that’s pretty much it. For a car device, you want some navigational capabilities, and I’m not sure if Spotify would ever integrate that into its offerings (or work with a third-party maps app) to make Car Thing more useful. But in its current implementation, I still have to place my Android smartphone against an air vent to see where I’m going and what the traffic is like. It’s almost comical, and it’s most certainly not what I expected when I went in search of a more sleek infotainment option.
If you’re a Spotify Premium user and you’re deeply embedded in its ecosystem—I mean, you love the playlists it delivers every week, and you don’t use other apps to engage with media—then maybe Car Thing is worth a try. And to be fair, Spotify makes no promises about Car Thing—just that “Car Thing has one job and does it awesomely.” But the days of single-use devices are behind us, especially when it comes to music. The iPhone made the iPod unnecessary, and it’s clear that Car Thing isn’t reinventing the wheel there.
I’m still on the hunt for an app that can replace Android Auto on my phone when Google phases it out for good. Until then, my trust Roav Bolt will have to get the job done.
Figuring out the age of the Internet is like figuring out the age of the universe: We could date it back to the 1960s and ARPANET, or the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol in 1983, or the launch of America Online in 1985, or the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, or maybe the creation of the Netscape browser in 1994.
However you date the inception of the Internet, two things are inarguably true: The technology has changed modern life in fundamental ways, and the modern Internet is absolutely rotten with abandonware. Not only is it chock-a-block with dead links and missing data, but many of the tools that we once used enthusiastically are either completely dead or exist today as ghostly, barely-functioning time capsules. Heck, Google alone has killed dozens of tools that it launched with great fanfare and then almost immediately abandoned.
Sometimes this is due to changing technologies—there were dozens of search engines prior to Google’s total domination of the space, after all—and sometimes it’s due to good old-fashioned capitalist competition. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of old Internet relics we left behind, and folks of a certain age might be forgiven for having a lingering affection for them. Or a lingering morbid curiosity, because sometimes there’s a definite WTF element to the old tools we used to rely on. Here are some of the Internet relics we left behind as we rocket relentlessly into the future.
While joining Apple, the world’s most valuable company, seems like a no-brainer today, things were different back in 2001. That’s when CEO Steve Jobs demanded — not asked — that Tony Fadell join the company to create a groundbreaking device. But the man who would go on to invent the iPod initially balked at the idea.
“I was like, ‘whoa whoa,'” Fadell tells me during a Zoom interview to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the iPod on Oct. 23. “Back then to go to Apple you had to be pretty nuts.”
In early 2001 while he was developing his own MP3 player, Fadell was tapped as a consultant by Apple, who asked him to come up with different prototypes for a digital music player that would work with the company’s just announced iTunes software. He clearly made an impression on Jobs. “We’re building this, and you’re now going to join us to build it,” Fadell recalled Jobs saying.
Of course, Fadell eventually agreed and led the team that built one of the most significant products in Apple’s history — one that is still available on Apple’s site (albeit in a vastly different form). The iPod turned a company struggling with sales and a tiny sliver of the personal computer market into a consumer electronics powerhouse. It also revolutionized the digital music business, effectively destroying CDs and turning Apple’s iconic white MP3 players, and their ubiquitous white headphones, into a status symbol.
Most importantly, much of the early work on the iPod paved the road for the iPhone, Apple’s next groundbreaking product. The iPhone changed virtually everything about how we live and interact with our mobile devices and made Apple, now worth $2.42 trillion, the most valuable company in the world.
Fadell, who followed up his iPod success by founding smart home product maker Nest Labs (later acquired by Google), talked me through the “crazy” early days of development on the iPod, why he thinks it succeeded and how it somehow endured the test of time. This is his story.
Apple declined to add anything to the story.
Just a consulting gig
Fadell, 52, wore a loose-fitting olive polo shirt and a pair of AirPods Max and spoke animatedly in our video chat. The veteran of Silicon Valley, who had stints at Philips Electronics and Apple spinoff General Magic before taking on the Apple gig, recalled those early days.
When Apple executive Jon Rubinstein, who had been tasked with creating a music player, came knocking in early 2001, Fadell was already working on his own startup, Fuse Systems, with the goal of creating a mainstream MP3 player. It was a nascent market, with more than a dozen players from different companies including Creative Labs and RCA. The problem: Sales of the devices, which cost a few hundred dollars apiece, only totaled 500,000 units in 2000, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Fuse itself faced plenty of rejection. Still, Fadell saw the Apple consulting gig as a chance to keep his own project alive.
“I’m going to go in and consult,” he said. “I’ll make some money and keep my company going.”
He spent roughly seven weeks researching different options for a digital music player, pulling research from his own company. Ultimately, he built three mockups made of Styrofoam, and used his grandfather’s fishing weights to give them the right amount of heft.
At the end of March 2001, he presented them to Steve Jobs. Apple veteran Stan Ng had worked with Fadell to prepare a stack of papers for the presentation — this was before the days of slideshows — and prepared him for both Jobs and his reputation for an explosive temper. “Those stories were ingrained in my brain, burned into my brain, so I’m going in nervous,” Fadell said.
Jobs immediately took the stack of papers, riffled through the pages and quickly tossed them aside. “Here’s what I want to do,” Fadell recalled Jobs saying, hijacking the conversation and forcing them to dive right in.
Tony Fadell, inventor of the ipod.
Composite by Sarah Tew/CNET
When presenting the models, Fadell did as Ng coached, showing off the worst model first, then the second and, finally, his favorite as the last option.
Jobs seized on it immediately.
“Steve picked it up and he’s like, ‘we’re building this and you’re now going to join us to build it,’ and I was like ‘whoa whoa,'” Fadell said.
It’s easy to forget that Apple jumping into this market wasn’t a sure-fire bet. The company’s sales, which came from its Mac computers, were on the decline, and Apple had posted a loss of $195 million in the prior quarter.
Fadell, who spent the past decade working on devices with “limited success,” wasn’t sure he could go through disappointment again by building an MP3 player no one would buy.
No surprise, but Jobs got his way.
‘Holy shit, is this going to work?’
After a few weeks of negotiations with Jobs, Fadell joined Apple in April 2001 and assembled a team made up of Fuse and General Magic employees to put together what would become the iPod. The project immediately faced an uphill challenge. The team needed to work with a lot of new components, including a brand new hard drive from Toshiba that Rubinstein, who oversaw the whole project, identified as the key ingredient for the iPod.
Other breakthroughs included new software for the user interface and a then-new kind of lithium ion pack, giving the device 10 hours of battery life that far exceeded anything else in the market.
They also had to figure out how to put that Toshiba drive — a (now) old-fashioned spinning-disk type, prone to damage if mishandled — into a portable device that would be shoved into pockets, dropped on the ground and thrown onto tables. On top of that, his team had to integrate Apple’s FireWire file transfer technology so people could quickly transfer their songs.
“There were a lot of ‘Holy shit, is this going to work?’ kind of moments,” he said. “We really didn’t know.”
All Fadell knew was that he had to get this thing out before Christmas 2001. That’s a tall order, considering it takes about 18 months to develop a new smartphone today. Fadell said he really got started in May — with a launch just five months later.
“It was nonstop, seven days a week,” he said.
Fadell’s team worked with the industrial design group, led by famed Apple designer Jony Ive, to finalize the look of the iPod. Because the next wave of Macs would embrace white and clear plastic, Apple took the same design language and applied it to the iPod.
Along the way, Fadell saw two other projects at Apple scrapped, which fueled him to move even faster to finish (he wouldn’t comment on what those projects were). Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, freezing the nation even as he had to rally the team in that final stretch. “It was absolutely nuts.”
That original iPod gave birth to more than a dozen successors.
Apple images composited by Sarah Tew/CNET
When Jobs unveiled the iPod at an Oct. 23 Apple event at its Town Hall amphitheater in Cupertino, California, the device wasn’t technically done, according to Fadell. The software wasn’t finished, and the company hadn’t signed off on the manufacturing plan. But Jobs gave that pre-1.0 version out to the media in attendance, along with the 20 CDs containing the music that was preloaded on the device.
After the launch, he and his team went right back to work. (Reporters who got the prerelease iPod were asked to return them a few weeks later when version 1.0 was released to the market.)
None of that stopped the iPod from garnering massive critical praise for its fresh design and innovative scroll wheel. (“Early observers thought it was a speaker,” Fadell mused.) But after the Mac faithful gobbled it up, the iPod, well, hit a sour note.
“After that, it was dead,” Fadell said.
The secret to the iPod’s success
That may have been Fadell being a bit melodramatic — Apple reportedly sold 125,000 units in that initial holiday stretch — but those sales weren’t going to turn the company around. The willingness to keep going was the critical part of a heart-to-heart conversation Fadell had with Jobs that convinced him to join the company.
Fadell asked Apple’s visionary leader if he was willing to go the distance with the iPod, not just investing in this first unit, but to commit to a family of products. Fadell had been through enough scenarios in which a company cancels the first product nine months in because it didn’t want to invest in the next one. In Fadell’s mind, it took three generations to get the ball rolling.
“A lot of people stop midway through the journey, and I wanted to make sure we weren’t going to do that,” he said.
Jobs told Fadell he was going to throw marketing dollars at the iPod, pulling resources from its core Mac business. And even though sales of the original iPod and the follow-up version didn’t light any fires, Jobs followed through.
“He held up his side of the business, and the rest is history,” he said.
It wasn’t until the iPod hit its third generation in 2003, complete with a sleek redesign, that it began to take off as a mass market phenomenon. Fadell said he and Jobs continually pushed each other to take each version further, and he noted that Apple had become the largest consumer of NAND flash memory when the iPod Nano came out.
Steve Jobs introducing the third-generation iPod.
Getty Images
“We had this cycle, this heartbeat, every 12 months,” he said. “We took some really big risks to hit it again and again. We weren’t playing it safe. We never rested on our laurels.”
The iPod also got another boost in April 2003, when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, giving people a way to buy music from a catalog of 200,000 digital songs rather than having to rip their own CDs.
There had been other digital music players before, but the iPod changed everything. It not only legitimized the category, it absolutely dominated it with more than 80% of the market. Along the way, Apple showed off its marketing prowess and created iconic ads (remember the iPod silhouette commercials?) to pitch the music and its player. Jobs also paired up with rock band U2 in 2004 on a special-edition, black and red version of the iPod with Bono and The Edge on hand for the introduction.
The original iPod.
Connie Guglielmo/CNET
By 2007, a little more than five years after that original launch, Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod. The business peaked in 2008 with sales of 54.8 million units, according to Statista. Fadell was involved with 18 iterations of the iPod.
By 2005, Fadell said Apple was already looking at the competitive threat of cellphones, which started packing in music players and cameras. His team played with prototypes that included a full-screen iPod with a virtual click wheel and that essentially combined an iPod Classic and its wheel with a phone. The Mac team had separately built a massive capacitive touchscreen the size of a pingpong table. Fadell said a mashup of all three eventually led to the iPhone, which was introduced in 2007.
And Apple changed the world of technology again.
Time machine
Apple still sells an iPod — a $199 iPod Touch that looks more like an iPhone than that original music player — which stands as a testament to its longevity.
Fadell, who had a hand in both the iPod Touch and the first three generations of the iPhone, left Apple in 2008, and in 2010 started Nest, which four years later he sold to Google for $3.2 billion. Today, he serves as principal at Future Shape, an advisory and investment firm that works with engineers on different facets of technology.
Fadell, then CEO of Nest Labs, speaking at LeWeb 2013.
Stephen Shankland/CNET
Fadell occasionally goes back to his old iPod. It’s loaded with ’90s and early 2000s alternative music, songs from the Seattle grunge scene, and The White Stripes, who hail from his hometown of Detroit and broke out around that time.
Fittingly, it’s a sort of monument to that crazy stretch when he and his team scrambled to build a product that was largely intended to serve the iTunes software, but ended up revolutionizing a market and supercharging Apple’s place in the tech world.
“It’s a window of time of my music library, and so you leave it that way,” he said. “You kind of jack in and you’re like, ‘I’m just right back to early 2000s music.’ It’s kind of like a really great mixtape.”
