Hacker News

The Music app still works with iPods, but only for songs you own

Yes, the MBAs won’t like it. But maybe, once in a while, companies should do things because they are cool and not because it clears some threshold on a magic spreadsheet.

I’d even settle for Apple opening up the Music app so I can upload music to my iPhone from Linux. But once again, that doesn’t make the spreadsheet sparkle.

You might be surprised. Companies like HiBy have a rather healthy music player lineup[0], where "fewer distractions" is an explicit marketing point. Similarly, despite rather capable smartphones being available for as little as $100, the "feature phone" market is still doing quite well - and it definitely isn't just the grannies who are buying them!

Steve Jobs famously launched the smartphone industry as "We are launching three things: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. It is one device, and we are calling it iPhone." Not having to carry a whole bunch of separate devices on a day-to-day basis was groundbreaking, and it was immediately clear that the synergy between the until-now separate features would open up a lot of new possibilities.

But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.

Sure, the market for a modern iPod refresh might not be gigantic, but I reckon it is definitely larger than the market for Apple Vision, or Meta's pervert glasses. The demand exists, the question is just whether it is large enough for Apple to care - especially when it means undermining their own golden goose app ecosystem.

[0]: https://store.hiby.com/collections/music-player

That price may be wishful thinking. Aren’t even their base ear buds $130?

FWIW, the last-gen iPod Nano had Bluetooth already.