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Comment by StrangeSound | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not the iPod community is alive and well! There are plenty of people buying them, replacing the battery and hard drive, performing some cosmetic mods, and daily driving them (me included)

It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated

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isn't that just because it's an Apple device? I mean, there are people buying those old Macs that shipped with System 7 or 9... it's a fun hobby I guess. But there again, fast forward to 2025, you download a 17GB OS update so it can tell you which apps you can and can't run on your computer (in a barely readable messages because transparent backgrounds are a thing now)

it has nothing to do with the brand and everything to do with the fact they are still a damn good mp3 player, especially when you swap in a brand new battery and a gigantic-capacity SD card (which also greatly reduces the weight of the device). The click wheel is still one of the most slick controls for a handheld electronic device I've ever seen. Plus there's even an open source replacement firmware for most iPods (among other mp3 players), adding plenty of neat features: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/WhyRockbox

Also probably because the iPods are very sturdy devices, which many competitors were not; my 2nd gen iPod Nano has suffered extreme abuse yet was perfectly usable. I somewhat regret throwing it away in a recycling bin some years ago.

A good explanation for their maintained prices is the high level of support they still receive from Apple.

Apple gets excoriated here for its backward compatibility, when the company takes very good care of its devices' backward compatibility. In Fall 2025 was the first time that any iPod lost support when macOS lost its Firewire drivers. Any USB iPod still completely works with the current version of macOS.

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