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The original iPod was a Firewire hard drive; you could connect it to your Mac and use it as a backup volume if you wanted. Apple took all that away a long time
by dreamcompiler 7y ago
The original iPod was a Firewire hard drive; you could connect it to your Mac and use it as a backup volume if you wanted. Apple took all that away a long time ago, and obviously it wasn't for technical reasons. It was so Apple could control and restrict how the customer used their devices. One of the many reasons why I changed from an Apple fan to an Apple hater.
- Trav5 7y agoHa, that's how I got my boss to buy me one. I backed up the server and carried my music around with me. Now I just carry a portable hard drive...
- scarface74 7y agoYou were able to use an iPod as a storage device throughout its entire lifetime. If Apple wanted to “control and restrict you” it would have been a lot harder to reverse engineer the iPod indexing format and allow third parties to write software that could store and retrieve music from the iPod.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoAt the beginning it was literally just a disk with an HFS+ file system. You could drag files to and from it with the Finder. No reverse engineering necessary.
- scarface74 7y agoYou’re talking about two separate things. You could never drag music to the iPod and have it recognized by the music player. You could always drag random files to it and have it work as a hard drive. On Windows it was NTFS (Fat32?) on Macs it was HFS+
- dreamcompiler 7y agoI never mentioned music. I was talking about files in general. And even with music it was easy to drag music files from an iPod; they were merely in a hidden folder. I don't remember trying to drag music to an iPod with the Finder because it used to be so easy to do that with iTunes.
- scarface74 7y agoYes you could always drag music from the iPod, but you never had anyway of knowing which song was which because all of the names were changed to a random filename.
- derefr 7y agoThe files kept their embedded ID3 tags, so if you had tagged them correctly in iTunes, you could use an ID3 tagger's "tag to filename" conversion to name the files.
- coldtea 7y agoWell, Apple has introduced the ability to connect external drives to iPads (and iPhones), and added regular a file browser for them to iOS. You just need a USB-to-lighting cable now... And while iPod could be connected as a drive via firewire, that was never the way to add/remove music there, since (for better or worse) it was never a dumb "play this folder" type player, but maintained a associated library format with metadata etc.
- derefr 7y agoIIRC, at first, that was just for cost/energy savings: rather than having a media-indexing daemon running on the iPod itself, they just made that media-indexing process happen in advance on your PC. And, in fact, as a single scan at import-into-library time, rather than a repeated filesystem scan to find changes. That latter choice also put a human in the loop, since you were probably interactively importing media (whereas media-indexing usually happens in the background.) This meant the human could be relied upon to notice and fix bad ID3 tags, which was a big problem for most audio files of the era and made many MP3 players a useless "unlabelled warehouse" when you had a lot of files on them.
- pnutjam 7y agoI modified an iPod clip to use mp3's dropped on. I can't remember the utility I used. This was years ago.
- caleb-allen 7y agoI was a kid when I got my first iPod and I remember storing a copy of Starcraft on it, to be able to play on school computers and on the computers at the University near my house. Great memories