It’s October 23, 2001. Headline: “Apple Presents iPod”. It promised "1,000 songs in your pocket" and fundamentally sparked what turned Apple into the most valuable electronics brand in the world.
Yet, a quarter of a century later, Apple’s official storefronts bear no trace of it. The iPod Classic was quietly phased out in 2014, and the iPod Touch in 2022, sacrificed to the all-consuming presence of the yearly iPhone release.
iPod is still going strong in the secondhand market, however, at least according to the latest marketplace data from eBay. Nostalgia for the iconic device is clear, with someone searching for an "iPod" on eBay "every two seconds worldwide".
This renaissance aligns with a broader consumer revolution according to eBay, with 76% of consumers surveyed having shopped secondhand in the past year.
Or, perhaps, this could also represent more evidence for an even greater shift in the tech industry. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but everything is rather expensive right now, isn’t it? Groundbreaking, I know. So let’s narrow the scope a little further.
Streaming is front and center for a lot of consumers right now. Whether that’s Netflix and Disney+ for film and TV, or Spotify for music streaming. And there’s a monthly cost attached to instantly stream media; we all know this. But it’s a cost that continues to tick upward, without offering any greater value to the consumer.
For a generation, like my own (I was born in 1997), that grew up curating MP3 libraries in iTunes—or a younger generation that’s, hopefully, becoming ever more weary of digital impermanence—we may have reached a relative tipping point.
The convenience of a Spotify, or Apple Music, or [insert any other music streaming service here] subscription no longer outweighs the price of the service. It used to be cheap and convenient, but now riddled with overbearing AI features, advertisements, and algorithms that heavily dictate listening habits; alongside increasing anxiety that I could lose access to something I love at the drop of a hat. And that’s increasingly applicable across all digital libraries, and not just streaming, where tracks, films, even entire video games vanishing from libraries are now regular occurrences.
Using an iPod to listen to music, rather than streaming on your phone, does start to feel a whole lot more appealing in 2026 and beyond. According to eBay, at least in the UK, you can pick up a Classic iPod for, on average, £45, an iPod Touch for about £30, and an iPod Nano for about £20. That’s not bad at all. Hopefully, at least by what eBay’s data is suggesting, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that access doesn’t equal ownership, and trends in the secondhand market continue to rise for the average consumer.