The ULTIMATE iPod Tier List!
last year I made a tier list for the iPhone and I annoyed pretty much everyone with my selection but luckily for you my taste in iPods is less radical so let's rank the best music player ever made from a tier to zoom tier no wait that that's the same thing from a tier to F tier starting with the first generation iPod ah yes the first iPod this thing was an absolute chunker it was so big that there was a full-size firewire port on top of the device for charging and for transferring songs and transferring songs it could well firewire was fast much faster than USB 1 of the day but even USB 2 iPods that would come years later were still slower than this first generation iPod when transferring music from your computer it was really cool but what made the iPod the iPod was iPod OS there's basically just a reskin version of portal player a company that apple had purchased about a year prior this whole product was developed in less than eight months and the fact that the general design and the OS stayed effectively unchanged until 2014 when Apple killed off non-touch iPods is frankly amazing that's 13 years proof that they pretty much got it right now these buttons around the perimeter would transform into the click wheel but this layout stayed the same throughout the entire run of the iPod and everyone would try to copy Apple afterwards it was the best input method frankly until touch came around this thing was built like a tank and yet it was felt compared to something like the creative Nomad and which was its only comparison there was tons of storage for the era five gigabytes thanks to a really cool hard drive but it did have four megabytes of flash built in so it could actually have skip protection which yes was a thing with those early hard drives it used iTunes which was new but incredibly refined jukebox software there was no store you could only rip your CDs and and or pirate music from Napster but it was a thing and so yeah the first iPod I mean this thing is asked here right it was four hundred dollars which is pretty expensive and it was also Mac only but it paved the way for future s to your iPods so I'm gonna have to give the first gen an a tier I know that's going to make people mad but you got to do what you got to do the second generation iPod ah this is where things get interesting right not quite this basically was a a really really tiny refresh to the original iPod that came less than a year after the iPods released the original iPod had a wheel this wheel right here literally spun physically on the original iPod and on the second gen they moved to a capacitive touch sensitive wheel for improved reliability and they also added a bunch of other things that made it just feel a little more premium there was a port cover over the firewire port which the original did not have importantly they added Windows compatibility but they did not bring iTunes to Windows which was the most compelling part of the iPod even in the early days you could only use it through music match and also almost no Windows computers had firewire so yeah I guess they made an effort to bring it to Windows but not really a good enough of an effort it did come in 10 and 20 gig capacities which was a lot larger than the original iPod and the price was lowered from 400 bucks to 299 dollars it was a good iPod but not different enough from the first gen to frankly in my book get anything more than a c tier boom and now we're cooking with fire the third generation iPod now I'm a little biased towards this model because this was the first iPod I ever used my dad bought one a 30 gig model at CompUSA remember that store and I still have this iPod today with the box but bias be darned this was an incredible iPod and I would have loved it even if I didn't have one but I do and I really like it visually it's fantastic the buttons moved from around the perimeter of the wheel to the top in a row it was the only iPod to break away from this mold all of these buttons were capacitive they're touch sensitive but they worked so well and they lit up orange and looked so freaking cool in the dark this is the iPod that also introduced the 30 pin dot connector which became a staple on iPods and iPhones for years to come and while it could only charge via firewire it did come with a USB cable in the box and it could sync over USB which was huge for Windows users that ta-da not only got USB support but also iTunes in 2003 the Year this iPod launched we also got the iTunes Store which made it the best way to legally acquire music 99 cents per single and it was a change that honestly we forget but it appended the entire recording industry because up until then you could maybe get singles on a promotional CD but generally you were buying the entire album this came out 99 songs you only buy the songs you like wow it was cool this was also the first iPod that sounded good and it just didn't sound it didn't just sound good but it sounded great it had two Dax two adcs along with an integrated headphone driver there was programmable sample rates there was an ADC high pass filter and audio data interfaces if you don't know what that means it doesn't matter point in case it still sounds amazing today and is a fantastic little iPod it also supported AAC which allowed for better sounding more compact audio files the battery life okay that did take a hit it dropped from 10 hours to 8 hours but it was significantly smaller and thinner which I think made it worth the trade-off this is an easy s-tier iPod um probably my favorite iPod ever in history ah doesn't look good there ah yes the iPod mini Apple's first breakthrough iPod for a few reasons well for one it first debuted the click wheel it would be used in pretty much all iPods as you can see for the next 10 years it could scroll through lists capacitively but then when you wanted to enact on something you would just depressed and tilt the entire wheel to access those action buttons this thing was crazy small for the time thinner than a deck of cards but it was still hard drive based and that hard drive carried four gigs of storage and put when compared to similarly kind of small devices like this they were all flash based which on the flip side sounds futuristic but on the realistic side was problematic because not only were they expensive but you had to buy the memory and the flash storage of the arrow was like 256 Megs 128 this was four gigs it was a lot and as if that wasn't enough it was priced at 249 dollars Apple Was Out For Blood there was not a similarly capacious MP3 player on the market of the same size and price it came in four colors the first for an iPod and my little brother got one he got an iPod before me so my heart wants to give it an F tier because that sucks for me but honestly this is an at your iPod for sure real good ah yeah that's a good looking iPod 11 green too all right next the iPod wait what what the frick is this oh right this is failed Republican presidential candidate Carly fiorina holding up an iPod as CEO of Hewlett-Packard why the frick was she holding a blue iPod well HP and apple partnered up because HP wanted to be cool and sell the iPod and in exchange Apple said all right but you have to ship iTunes on every single one of your computers and HP was like all right now this blue HP iPod never happened but there was a fourth gen iPod an iPod mini an iPod photo and an iPod Shuffle that all had HP variants now they were identical there was no special colors it was just an ugly HP logo engraved onto the back of the devices but HP did sell enough of them that it made up about five percent of iPod sales for apple and it massively increased iTunes penetration on the market but what's not cool is that Apple would not service them at their store since they were not Apple products they were HP products if your iPod that was HP branded broke you would have to mail it to an HP service center despite this Hardware being identical to the other iPods this is an instant F tier like not even no no you know what it's worse than F tier it's we're just gonna put it right there awful iPod the fourth gen iPod this is a good iPod they basically took the good of the third gen they took the click wheel from the iPod mini they stuck them together increased the base model storage and boom done but they did start to cheap out on stuff and they stopped including the case the dock they used to have these little dot connector covers too that was gone there was no remote you got nothing and you know what that's just that's not cool man they didn't do enough and they took away too much of the old cool stuff it's not a bad iPod but it was just kind of you know not good enough D tier uh no just no this is a fourth generation monochrome iPod for fifty dollars more money and in exchange you get Bono's signature and advertisement scribbled on the back but don't worry because that 50 did go a little bit further you got a 50 discount if you decided to torture yourself with the entire YouTube box set discography black and red is not a cool combo I'm sorry Marquez and U2 is not a cool Band F tier now the iPod photo is also considered a fourth generation iPod but it came out several months later and it had a color display so I almost consider it a secondary generation now you may think okay color display all of the good about the iPod that gives it an eight here right hold on because all you could do on this iPod photo is look at photos and at 220 by 176 pixels which for the day wasn't that bad but the display itself wasn't great Chief to make matters worse Apple wanted 500 for the privilege of seeing color this is bad as is but considering that less than a year later a new iPod would come out with a better display video playback capability a smaller case size and a 200 lower price tag yeah pretty much anyone that bought one of these got screwed and that's gonna have to make it an e-tier for me it's not as bad as the Bonnet box ah yes the second generation mini let me put this next to the first generation so you can see the difference so the buttons they're green now that's kind of literally what they did they made the base storage a little bit better they dropped the price fifty dollars they did add more vibrant colors but they also stopped getting rid of most of the accessories that came with the device it was a good iPod but a really lazy update I'm gonna have to give it a seat here what is not a c tier is the first generation iPod Shuffle I won this iPod in an arcade machine so that automatically makes it fantastic yeah sure there's no display and playing songs on shuffle was kind of gimmicky but it was so 2005. I mean this was during the era of 99 cent singles we weren't listening to albums anymore and even today this thing feels absolutely tiny it's like a thick stick of gum and that's thanks to flash storage it's the first iPod that shipped with flash the bottom cap had a cute lanyard accessory that you could hang around your neck but more importantly when you pulled the cap off it revealed a built-in USB a connector that you could just plug directly into your computer to sync and charge not only that but you could even use it as a flash drive at a time when those were quite expensive this thing is bloody brilliant it was the first iPod available under 100 even though that model had a measly 512 gigs of storage and also fun fact the first generation Shuffle is widely considered the best sounding iPod ever made it has an incredible Sigma tail DAC that is lusciously warm the first Shuffle is the best Shuffle and flexes s tier muscles for sure boom looks good there the first generation nano this was my first iPod ever can you believe it I got it Christmas 2005 and boy did I love it now there's not many Steve Jobs moments more iconic than him talking about how the iPod mini is the best selling iPod they've ever made but that they're gonna kill it off anyways for something better and something newer and then he does the bit where he points to his watch pocket and his jeans and says have you ever wondered what this pocket is for and then he pulls out the Nano yeah well that was a great demo because 12 year old me thought it was freaking insane that a music player could be four millimeters thick even today that's bananas that's half the thickness of the thinnest iPhone ever it had all flash storage a color display and a bottom mounted headphone jack that made this one of two devices that really started the iPod Revolution I mean in 2005 alone they shipped five times as many iPods as every year prior to that combined everyone wanted an iPod and that was much in part thanks to the Nano I don't care that the screen got scratched by just looking at it this is an S to your iPod no if ands or buts about it baby okay I have a confession to make I really liked my iPod Nana but most of my friends had gotten the fifth generation iPod for Christmas and I will admit that I was jealous that they were watching the office and other TV shows that I could not watch because the Nano did not have video playback no other iPod did prior to this bad boy it offered a larger brighter display in a thinner more premium chassis than the iPod photo at almost half the cost of its predecessor I can't believe that we thought watching video on a two and a half inch screen was awesome but we did it was a thing we did and I wanted the video so bad I wanted it so bad that I asked my parents for one for my 13th birthday even though that was only four months after having gotten my Nano and they agreed they gave it to me but on the condition did I pass my Nano down to my brother to replace his old iPod mini it seemed like a fair trade at the time and it was really this iPod and the iPod Nano that were the first to come in Black well except for this freaking Bono box and we're done with this right uh I got the black one but wait what no there's another one ah stop get off of here freak you too okay yeah so anyway um okay this one is kind of cheating it's not an iPod but it's amazing because it was a blunder that didn't sell despite being pretty decent jobs was really excited about the iPod Hi-Fi but the market positioning was just all wrong the marketing was lousy and it didn't sell at all check out my video I did on this a couple years ago or I'll give you the same grade that I'm giving the iPod Hi-Fi uh D tier already time for second gen now yep it took on the colored aluminum casing of the iPod mini that it replaced the display was brighter the storage was bumped and new software features like search and gapless Playback arrived it was also the first product red model that Apple ever shipped and it was so popular this red color that they ended up bringing it back to the higher capacity model as well it also fixed in my opinion the biggest blight of the first generation nano which was the scratchable surface and build quality but really uh didn't really do much anything else so this is a BTR iPod the second generation Shuffle it did lose the amazing DAC of the first gen but it also lost like I mean look at this thing this is not to scale but I lost like 80 percent of its size it was so small that it had to be charged and synced via the headphone jack which yeah was dreadfully slow you could also use it as an external USB drive like the first generation but because of the headphone jack and cable wasn't quite as convenient and the second gen Shuffle was really tiny and had a built-in clip for Fitness so yeah I'd give it a b tier but uh wait till you hear the price 49 49 freaking dollars for the one gig model and 69 for the 2gig model 50 for an iPod for that reason alone Shuffle two is a tier ah here's something I recognize the 2007 iTouch I can't even say it jokingly every time someone said I touch even in the past Steve Jobs is retroactively rolling in his grave here's the thing it's not called the iTouch it's never been called the iTouch say that out loud I touch that sounds gross but I certainly not gonna touch this because even though it only came out three months after the iPhone and shared the same processor it was not like the iPhone you see the iPhone had an iPod app and this didn't because well it was an iPod so the music and the videos those are all separated but I think the real reason is because look at this screen there's basically nothing on here there's no stocks app there's no Maps there's no notes there's no weather there's no camera there's no email I mean I get the camera but all of those other things you didn't need cellular you could have done that on Wi-Fi email on this why now there was a calendar app oh big deal but you couldn't actually even add anything to the calendar you could only view what you had added from your computer or from your phone well what now it did ship with YouTube and Safari which I think bumps it's great up but YouTube was certainly in its infancy it was mostly little short cat videos and the mobile browser while impressive was limited in a world where flash was still so dominant with that said it was the first iPod that could download songs wirelessly from iTunes though it couldn't sync wirelessly it had options for closed captioned video it had video progress retention so you could pause a movie exit the app come back later and says you want to keep watching that was nice and other settings that were not present on classic iPods Additionally the DAC present was much better than the DAC on the iPhone but the screen was not it was a dim TN panel that was much worse than the original iPhones with just 16 gigs of storage and it's 400 price point ah this thing was a tough pill to swallow upon release it was a technological wonder and much beloved and those apps along with the App Store did come later so it's probably deserving of a tier except it did age really poorly due to its processor and many touches would never see later versions anyways because Apple charged 10 to 20 dollars for each software update so for that I'm gonna have to give it a B2 yes I know it was for accounting reasons that doesn't matter that's not cool don't charge for software especially when it's free on the iPhone okay what's next that fat Nano I love fat Nano the third generation nano is probably my favorite Nano ever this is a very polarizing design you either love it or you hate it and if you hate it you're wrong because the Nano third gen was awesome for a few reasons look how tiny the click wheel is it's just minuscule but even though it was small it was still really usable the wheel was made stubby in order to make room for a much larger horizontal display not only for a better view of the iPods UI but also for video playback which was the first for the Nano line it had a two inch screen which was very small for video but it had the same resolution as the larger two and a half inch iPods which made it the most pixel dense iPod ever at 200 PPI that was even higher than the brand new iPod Touch it also had this uh new cool split screen navigation menu where you could navigate on the left side but then see uh album art and progress on the right side it was very beautiful and it also had the iPod Touches cover flow feature okay with all that said it didn't have the greatest stack and the small ssds were not really conducive to video storage you could get one or maybe two movies on there and that's about it so even though my heart says s tier because I love this thing and it's probably a b to your iPod but I still love it and now we get to the best iteration of the original iPod because it's the last hard drive based iPod Apple ever made and they nailed it the classic takes all of the good of the fat Nano's new UI in addition to the best screen ever on an iPod it puts everything in this really handsome all metal enclosure and offers huge capacities of 80 and 160 gigs now this is where we get a little confusing here because this is a single icon okay but it's actually two generations of iPod the Sixth Gen which came out in 2007 the 80 and 160 gig storage capacities those actually had a pretty terrible deck one of the worst that apple had used in years you didn't want that one but a year later the Seventh Generation came out and it replaced both the 80 and the 160 gig models with one size 120 gigabytes and it's this one not only is the DAC excellent but the headphone was also great for the first time ever for using High impedance headphones and I don't know if you noticed this thing is thin it was thinner than any previous hard drive based iPod including the sixth generation classic there was a fat classic and a thin classic the thin is the one you want this was the perfect send-off to the classic iPod and is absolutely unquestionably asked here okay nano4 yeah nanochromatic this thing went back to Vertical had a lot of colors there was an accelerometer for a couple of games and a terrible shake to shuffle gimmick there was a really really bad deck it shipped with the genius Auto playlist feature that was uh frankly dumb and it still played video but horizontally and awkwardly I do not like this Nano D tier okay the second gen touch this thing shipped with a slightly faster processor than the first gen not much but a little it had a redesign that uh added much more scratchable corners thanks Apple but check out the home screen all those apps that were missing they're here now which is great and it also has the app store which should basically probably Auto s tier any iPod that has it but I cannot for the second generation touch dropped the great DAC that shipped in the original the display was still crappy and while it did eventually get two years of software updates including iOS 4 which the original touch never did it didn't get any of the good features of iOS 4 because the processor was crap there was no home screen wallpapers there was no multitasking there was no game center and more it was good on day one but had extraordinarily poor longevity uh d-tier he literally made an iPod with no buttons oh my gosh the DAC on this was not good it didn't have good sound quality there were no buttons so unlike previous shuffles you had to use apple compatible headphones or silly little adapters that you would plug into the iPod to add buttons and then plug your real headphones into what it didn't offer USB Mass Storage support which the prior two shuffles had offered and it was 30 dollars more expensive than the prior model this is an easy F tier except for the fact that I really like it it did offer voice over which would tell you what song you were listening to which was kind of nice and it did also offer multi-playlist support which was the first for a shuffle and uh yeah it's so ridiculous that you kind of can't look at it and not smile it's e-tier because it sucks but it's ours the fifth generation nano is the end of an era because it's the last iPod to ever ship with a click wheel its headlining feature was shooting video uh yeah and it did a really bad job at it the camera was VGA it was terrible and oh by the way you couldn't shoot photos I'm not kidding only video but they did add a bunch of other things that iPod users had been asking for for years it had a lower price point of 150 and 200 for 8 and 16 gigs respectively and it got features like an FM radio with tagging and you could even pause and then resume the radio functionality it would record a little bit and you could resume playback which was great it had a built-in pedometer for Nike Plus support there was a speaker it had an onboard microphone for voice recording this is probably the best Nano ever made even though it came late in the lineup and is often forgotten this is certainly an a tier Nano Okay the third gen touch actually was a pretty big deal because there was a huge leap in performance graphically thanks to taking some of the iPhone 3gs's internals this made it way better for playing games there was also a much improved oleophobic coating for fingerprint management and it was the first iPod to get free updates but it still lacked a camera and the DAC wasn't very good it was better than the other two previous iPod Touches but it didn't have the lasting permanence or at least the the impact that the original touch had when it launched it also only got two years of limited support there were no updates after two years it never got Siri which was like one of the major features for iOS 5. so I honestly I think we can only do c tier for this one it was better but still not good ah yes the apology Shuffle as you can see apple added back buttons but not just any buttons the largest buttons of any Shuffle to date if that's not a statement of regret well I don't really know what is despite adding large buttons back it's still the second smallest Shuffle ever it's tiny now it's not as small as that because look at that freaking thing but it was really really small and not only did they add back buttons but they added back a DAC that actually sounded good this thing was an excellent sounding music player especially considering its size the size was not the only thing that got bigger but yes it was because the price got smaller it went from 80 bucks down to that 50 price point that was kind of key to the shuffle success and apple kept this 4th gen Shuffle in the lineup for seven years but they did update it fairly frequently with updates and a ton of new colors it's not as good as the first gen but it's still a really great Shuffle it's gonna have to be a tier for me the fourth gen touch was the first great iPod Touch in my opinion it added front and rear cameras for the first time which obviously brought with it FaceTime support it also included a really fantastic Retina Display basically the same you were gonna get on your iPhone and it added the same A4 SOC that was found in the current generation iPhone 4 spec for spec this thing was basically identical just Sans phone components it had higher capacity storage options than the previous model and it came in black and white it is the single biggest generational leap for the touch in my opinion but it's still not going to be S tier for me because it only got two years of software updates here's the thing Apple said that it had performance issues with iOS 7 testing so they never brought iOS 7 to this device but I call bubkus on that because it had the same display and the same SOC as the iPhone 4 and that device got iOS 7. so I can't give an S tier but I am absolutely going to give it a tier it was a really really good touch speaking of touch the 6th gen Nano I love the 6th gen Nano and I know a lot of people don't but I think that's because they're not thinking of it like it should be thought of it's like a fancy Shuffle its size was absolutely tiny it was the only Nano to have a built-in clip and it moved to a touch screen card style UI it was a lot less efficient than the click wheel that it had replaced but it did work and it even had the ability to display a bunch of different clock faces which meant that a bunch of third-party case makers came out and made watch straps for this thing so that you could strap an iPod to your wrist I think it was in many ways a hat tip and practical exercise in apple watch development it was delightful but frankly it was not a very good Nano to get to its small size it dropped the speakers the camera the built-in microphone video playback it also packed a smaller battery with less playback time and the DAC also sucked so yeah as a nano not great as a shuffle eight here easily but this thing was 150 and a nano successor and so because of that I'm gonna have to give it a c tier but I still love it the 5th gen touch came after a two-year Hiatus it was clear the iPhone was a runaway success maybe even more than Apple anticipated and the smartphone was rapidly becoming something for everyone which kind of ruined the iPod Touch lineup but the Touch 5 did still have some effort put into it now unlike the prior generation touch which had as we discussed SOC parity with the iPhone The Touch 5 did not it was using the one-year-old A5 but it did upgrade the cameras and added 1080p video recording which was nice and it also got the better four inch display it was found in the iPhone 5. this also also meant that it was the first touch to ship with lightning they came in a bunch of fun colors and there was a button on the back that could be pressed and a loop could be snapped into this kind of weird button accessory thing I mean I who needed a wrist strap for their iPod I don't really know still it was cute it was something there was effort the problem was price at 300 starting price point there were a lot of tablets including the mere 30 dollars more expensive iPad Mini that offered a better value for kids who were let's be honest the target market at this point for the iPod Touch I'm gonna have to give this a uh uh see that beat seat here the last gen Nano was a confused one they took a step back from the radical watch Nano to a more iPod touch-like design I mean look there's a home button and all but they failed to create something compelling with this otherwise really good blueprint I mean it looked like iOS but it didn't run iOS and subsequently it felt lost it was it was less feature complete than the emaciated Zune HD that had shipped two years prior there were no apps there was no camcorder there was no microphone there's no calendar no notes no alarms no contacts and even the games that had been offered on the fifth generation nano years prior there was a larger display which was nice and it did bring back video playback audio could even be played wirelessly over Bluetooth but the display was remarkably poor not just for the era but even compared to past Nanos like again the 5th gen it's pitch well it's pitch was this is the thinnest iPod ever big whoop it was too expensive for what it was and it's sadly a Bitter End to the traditional iPod it's probably a d-tier or an e-tier but honestly this was so low of an effort for the last product of an era that I have to give it and after it was just bad what else can we see apple not care about ah the iPod touch the iPod Touch 6th Generation was the first update in two and a half years but it did bring the current gen A8 SOC that was found in the iPhone 6 and performance was actually even better than the iPhone because it had the older smaller four inch screen but compared to the new iPhones I mean the old display size and resolution just felt disappointing and battery life is quite poor too now what wasn't disappointing was the camera which was actually pretty close in performance to the iPhone 6 the flagship device at the time now it did ditch the wrist Loop accessories and there was no touch ID see that it's just a regular home button but it did drop the price down to 199 dollars and it got four years of software support and technically because of a security patch that was released just a few months ago it got eight years of support but not actually okay all in all this was actually a really good touch even if it was a boring one and I think it earns B tier ah we're to the end with the 7th gen touch Best For Last right this thing came out four years after the Sixth Gen touch not that long ago 2019 and it shipped with an A10 Fusion chip which was a pretty powerful iPad chip but remember that chip was already three years old on release and nothing else changed at all nothing zero it had the same iPhone 6 camera it had the same old four inch display it had the same lousy battery life there was no effort at all they just swapped the chip and like man and the mere three years of updates reflect that this thing was most certainly a play for businesses and education who still relied on them but that was pretty much it Apple had stopped caring about the iPod years before and it's a shame that I've got to do it but the last iPod ever the seventh generation iPod Touch it's F tier easy so there you have it 20 years of iPods put into a list we had some extreme Highs but also some extreme lows and perhaps unsurprisingly but depressingly those lows came near the end of the iPod's life and it exited with a whimper rather than a roar but what's your favorite iPod do you think my list is nutties let me know down below thank you so much for watching and as always stay snazzy oh [Music]
2023-05-21 14:57
