4 ms·
The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the s
by nubinetwork 3mo ago
The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen. Nobody wants to put the effort into something that's going to be as basic as a mp3 player.
- fortyseven 3mo agoI find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
- trencedamp 3mo agoIt barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays
- ezst 3mo agoWould you still adore it as much today, though? I know I don't adore my iPod classic as much now as I did in 2006, and that's inclusive of the nostalgia kick. It's just not very practical and usable in today's world.
- SpecialistK 3mo agoI don't use it daily, but I enjoyed rediscovering and using my MiniDisc stuff that I was inspired to build a pretty popular website around it :)
- ezst 3mo agoI would really love to try MD: besides the "tactileness" of it, the storage limits imposes to actively curate playlists and make compromises on how much/what music you can carry with you given the circumstances. An iPod classic already has so much storage available that this thought is secondary and you don't have to engage with your music to the same extent.
- SpecialistK 3mo agoAbsolutely, and that's something I've tried to highlight in the FAQs on the site - limitation breeds creativity. It makes you appreciate the media just a little bit more. One of the best places to have MD is in a car. You can quickly identify (by unique color or label) each disc, which is either a full album presented as the artist intended or a playlist you curated. There's no "shuffle all 5000 songs" or "here's a playlist Spotify calls 80s kitchen songs but is half 90s pop you've heard before"
- steveBK123 3mo agoThe other place I've thought I'd like to go back to MD is just sitting in bed and listening to some music. I don't want to fiddle with my phone and get blasted by light from the screen. I don't want to swipe through an infinite list of all music known to man. I don't want to wait for an app to update, page to load, song to buffer or pop-up upselling me to need to be dismissed. I want to listen to music I own, on a device I own, which instantly responds when I press play. That's it.
- SpecialistK 3mo agoAll 100% true. Just watch out for dead batteries (especially rechargables, because there are no Low Self Discharge Ni-MH gumsticks)
- Melatonic 3mo agoWhat's the website ?
- SpecialistK 3mo agoThe MiniDisc Wiki at minidisc.wiki [didn't mention it before because self-promo]
- ezst 3mo agoAmazing resource, indeed, Good job there!
- thejazzman 3mo agoI still adore the hell out of my 512GB (SD) iPod Classic/Minis You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc. https://github.com/jmonster/podhnologic https://github.com/jmonster/podhnologic
- ezst 3mo agoThe tactile experience is a nice throwback in a touchscreen mostly/no physical buttons present, but the display is garbage by modern standards, finding specific tracks sucks, and doing any amount of playlist management is an exercise in frustration. And that is with replacing the firmware with rockbox, which significantly improves on those areas :-) https://www.rockbox.org/ https://www.rockbox.org/
- trencedamp 3mo agoHard to be objective through the nostalgia tbh. I would expect more today I guess
- youngtaff 3mo agoI adored my MiniDisc too but the limited storage of a single disk makes it easy to find the music you want Given how much we can store in solid state not sure I’d want to navigate my library without a screen
- Rohansi 3mo ago> as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.
- nubinetwork 3mo agoAnd they're all e-waste nuggets sitting in dankpods' storage closet... :)
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoSo like the original iPod Shuffle? Just buttons, a clip and a headphone jack, no screen. (I do think they need a minimum size to be usable but companies can be creative with the form factor)