All clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity
26 comments
·September 8, 2025sippeangelo
iPod games in all honor, but none of these games beat jailbreaking your 1st gen iPod nano, dual-booting whatever OS and playing the Half-Life 1 DOOM Wad on it. My only regret in life is exchanging it for the 6th gen when Apple did a recall for some reason.
singular_atomic
Wondering if Apple revived the iPod today, would it actually take off? Feels like everyone’s trying to cut back on phone time.
NoLinkToMe
Doubt it, there’s plenty of mp3 players out there including 2nd hand ipods. You don’t see them in use much. Ratio of for sale / in-use is probably a good indicator for a new product not to take off.
Also most watches can function as music players with wireless headphones nowadays. For a while I ran a low-notification apple watch purely for the time, nfc (payments and to enter the gym) and music functions.
anthk
They could call it... disconnectng pod... iDisco-pod.
phire
Most people don't consider listening to music on your phone to count as "Screen Time".
h4ch1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM7mdKy3opo
If someone like me wanted to see a playthrough. What a trip down memory lane. Still remember having Mr Bean's Holiday on my clickwheel iPod and watching it every time my parents took me somewhere to the point I remembered all the dialogues.
Good times.
Tepix
Great to see this piece of history preserved. We need more innovative game controllers!
chmod775
Reminds of those games Archos (Gmini or AV?) devices had decades ago. Some of them were quite neat.
black_puppydog
dear god I had forgotten Achos. I had a Gmini 120 and loved it. :)
toomuchtodo
HelloUsername
posted 29-oct-2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41978486
ksynwa
Sorry but I have a tangential question. What is the state of portable music players these days? Are there any that are good and reasonably priced?
DecentShoes
Mod an iPod with hundreds of gigabytes of SD storage, a bigger battery, and bluetooth
unfitted2545
A used iPod (probably flashed with the open source Rockbox firmware) for the cool factor and reducing ewaste. This is an amazing guide: https://yuuiko.github.io/iPodGuide/iPodGuidev2-1.pdf that gives recommendations on what model and the mods you can do. I have a 5.5 gen with an SD card mod all for £50.
Edit: Actually, I forgot the eBay listing said it was a 5.5 gen but the serial number when I got it was just 5th gen, and I got a full refund! £20 in total then.
echelon_musk
The CPU in the iPod Video is a measly 80MHz compared to the 216MHz iPod Classic. I'd recommend anyone to buy a Classic.
rokkamokka
Normally, a phone with a streaming app or large SD card.
mkbkn
By the way, take a look at Snowsky Echo Mini
mkbkn
Replaced with usually expensive (as compared to non-Applle devices) "digital audio players".
aa-jv
FIIO's M21 looks pretty decent:
Its an audiophile market now, you know .. gold buttons sound better, and all that.
taneliv
"Buy now" button goes to a 404 page? Or maybe I need to be on a Chinese VPN, who knows these days.
(Anyway, I was merely interested in the price range, and probably not actually buying.)
Sony Walkman series also has nifty looking devices, but way over my budget (even the entry level model).
aa-jv
Dunno whats up with their "Buy Now" button, other than its not unusual for manufacturers to not actually sell their products direct.
Amazon has it listed for 220euro's, which is a reasonable price imho.
Of course there are other manufacturers out there, this is just the one I know about ..
pjerem
"reasonably priced"
mystifyingpoi
It's not really a mp3 player that a regular person would use anyway. Seems to be all on high-res audio and high power output for the headphones. No casual music listener needs that.
aa-jv
$300 is reasonable, imho. Cheaper than an iPhone anyway.
black_puppydog
Okay, now all we need is to port them to the tangara. :D
It takes a few minutes to get used to the controls, but Ms. Pac-Man on an iPod Video is quite good.