About 40% of people in America, 30% globally, collect things. And although most things that we collect are physical objects, our reasons for collecting - the feelings we get, the experiences and ideas, are the most important part of the equation and yet much harder to describe. 

For the past few years I’ve been collecting something commonplace, or at least used to be: iPods. Many of us have owned or at least used one, and eventually moved on to modern devices and those iPods ended up in a junk drawer or thrift store.

This is my first iPod, which I received as a Christmas present when I was 10 years old. While most of my classmates had the iPod Nano or Touch, my mom gave me the Shuffle. It was what she could afford for me, and I loved it. Even though this generation of Shuffle is widely regarded as one of Apple’s worst iPods - a ridiculously small device so tiny that it had to move the playback controls to the headphone wire, I was obsessed with it. It amazed me how small it was, how holding the play/pause button would have the iPod read aloud the name of the song I was listening to. but mostly what I treasured was the fact that my mom saved for and bought me this thing because she knew I wanted an iPod. Just any iPod.

At the time we didn’t have a home computer so my grandpa set it up for me with his. He loaded it up with a ton of classical music from his iTunes music. It was a little while until someone else loaded on music that was more my taste for the time. I remember listening to some Snow Patrol, Nelly Furtado, and I think some Tool.

The 4th gen Touch was the second iPod I ever owned. By the sixth grade I had been coveting a Touch so much that I’d made many out of cardboard. An opportunity had presented itself  on boxing day of 2012, when the Touch was discounted at Best Buy by $30. I pulled the trigger and spent all of my paper route money on it.

Almost 3 years ago now, I was feeling nostalgic for it and all of the games I’d once had it. I bought a used one that matched my original and relived those memories from a decade earlier. That became the gateway iPod that kickstarted my modern collection.

Today, the iPod is cool to own again, and the community of people restoring and modding them is growing. You can still find lots of parts for them very cheaply. People, including myself love to mod iPods with more reliable flash storage, bigger batteries, and custom colored shells. The only thing I will never replace is an iPod’s backplate.

iPods are time capsules that usually come with someone else’s music and videos. But even if they’re reset before I get my hands on them, the engraving remains. It’s very personal to engrave an iPod because you’d have to think you’d be holding onto it forever and you’d need to spend the time to think of something significant to write on it. Among my favorites that I own are a third gen that I bought from a lady which still has her name on it, and a fourth gen with a pharmaceutical company’s logo - the story behind which i’ll never know. The most important is my late aunt’s sixth gen which has the names of my cousins. By the time it ended up in my hands I was so happy to see it still has all of the music (lots of Nickleback) and movies I remember from childhood.

Music is one of the most important things to us when we’re young and our music players become almost an extension of ourselves. When I created a channel for people to submit their music memories this week, I received submissions of songs people listened to in case they needed to impress their friends, memories of downloading from LimeWire and burning CDs, to people’s first iPods, CD Walkmans, and Zunes. 

These things hold so much importance to us that we can talk about them at length. Just starting the conversation uncovers secondary and tertiary memories we might not have thought of until that moment. And the whole exercise helped me realize that this is how I want to actually connect with others over my collection. I don’t want to share my entire collection passively, to put it out there for others to see without being able to also share the history and the invisible qualities that make these iPods special to me. That’s why I will never share my collection online. But this one time, I’ll share part of it with you.

If you’re interested in picking up an iPod, head to your local thrift store or Facebook Marketplace and see what you can find. Make sure you test before you buy. If you need to fix it up, grab yourself some parts from AliExpress or Elite Obsolete. This $30 toolkit from iFixit has always had everything I’ve ever needed. Go make some new memories.