I was over in rural Western Ireland at the end of 2023 when I was given a white 1st gen iPod touch by a relative who was cleaning some junk out of the house. I had previously expressed my soft spot for tech history, so this wasn’t completely random, and they would have binned it otherwise.
It was seemingly unharmed by the intervening years albeit missing a charging cable. The weather outside was what the Irish, with their particular brand of sardonic humor, might describe as “a soft fine day”, and what I would refer to instead as “a relentless bone-chilling mist”. We had no plans that day.
So I found a computer shop, a tiny place in the nearby village, thinking they might have this specific proprietary cable. I make the drive, tell the guy (who presumably owns and runs this tiny shop) what I’m looking for and he has no fucking clue. I couldn’t really blame him though, because Apple had just gone to the USB C standard at this point, at least in Europe, so this was a cable 2 generations of proprietary connectors ago. Not the previous “lightning” cable with 8(?) pins, but the OG one, the wide fucker with hella pins. Some of you might remember these, as they were seemingly in every room, car and backpack circa 2010.
The guy had a pegboard on the wall behind him with all his wares hanging up. I scanned the various cables, adapters, and peripherals until I landed on my quarry, a small white box containing “cable: 30-pin apple dock connector to USB A” in trademark Apple white. It was the very last one. I forked over 8 euros for the thing, expressed my immense surprise and appreciation to the shop guy for having stocked this kind of item and went back home with it.
I started charging up the iPod. Not only did it take a charge and boot, it was unlocked too, and worked flawlessly! The thing was a veritable time capsule – chock full of era-appropriate pop music, mundane notes and voice memos, and even some silly photos and videos taken with the shitty little onboard camera.
My wife still ribs me for this one: the time I “spent a whole day of our Irish holiday ignoring us to play with obsolete tech”, but for me it’s a very fond memory, and I’m serious about that. I still have the device in its unaltered form and I go through its contents now and again, and that reliably brings me a rare sort of joy. All because some dude decided to hang onto a single cable long enough to forget what it was even for, allowing it to take up precious shelf space in what may be the only tech shop in Connemara. He must have figured that someday someone would need it!
I still have a cable with one of those very connectors in use today. Some will recall that a lot of stereos and clocks had those connectors built in to dock and charge your ipods on. I bought a 2007 Eclipse that didn’t support Bluetooth and I wanted to add it. I then bought a Bluetooth receiver designed to plug into those ipod connectors and a cable I could attach to the backend of my car stereo that had the same. I still have that car today and that wiring and Bluetooth receiver is still tucked away behind my dashboard, working as well as it did almost 20 years ago when installed.
Story time:
I was over in rural Western Ireland at the end of 2023 when I was given a white 1st gen iPod touch by a relative who was cleaning some junk out of the house. I had previously expressed my soft spot for tech history, so this wasn’t completely random, and they would have binned it otherwise.
It was seemingly unharmed by the intervening years albeit missing a charging cable. The weather outside was what the Irish, with their particular brand of sardonic humor, might describe as “a soft fine day”, and what I would refer to instead as “a relentless bone-chilling mist”. We had no plans that day.
So I found a computer shop, a tiny place in the nearby village, thinking they might have this specific proprietary cable. I make the drive, tell the guy (who presumably owns and runs this tiny shop) what I’m looking for and he has no fucking clue. I couldn’t really blame him though, because Apple had just gone to the USB C standard at this point, at least in Europe, so this was a cable 2 generations of proprietary connectors ago. Not the previous “lightning” cable with 8(?) pins, but the OG one, the wide fucker with hella pins. Some of you might remember these, as they were seemingly in every room, car and backpack circa 2010.
The guy had a pegboard on the wall behind him with all his wares hanging up. I scanned the various cables, adapters, and peripherals until I landed on my quarry, a small white box containing “cable: 30-pin apple dock connector to USB A” in trademark Apple white. It was the very last one. I forked over 8 euros for the thing, expressed my immense surprise and appreciation to the shop guy for having stocked this kind of item and went back home with it.
I started charging up the iPod. Not only did it take a charge and boot, it was unlocked too, and worked flawlessly! The thing was a veritable time capsule – chock full of era-appropriate pop music, mundane notes and voice memos, and even some silly photos and videos taken with the shitty little onboard camera.
My wife still ribs me for this one: the time I “spent a whole day of our Irish holiday ignoring us to play with obsolete tech”, but for me it’s a very fond memory, and I’m serious about that. I still have the device in its unaltered form and I go through its contents now and again, and that reliably brings me a rare sort of joy. All because some dude decided to hang onto a single cable long enough to forget what it was even for, allowing it to take up precious shelf space in what may be the only tech shop in Connemara. He must have figured that someday someone would need it!
Just checked in the parallel universe what you would’ve been up to instead, turns out the two of you bought a lottery ticket as a goof & won
(life was never simple or pure again) PHEW dodged it
Should’ve called me, we have several of those cables around. And that’s after culling the herd of those cables we used to have!
Oh we should start a community for, “I need this cable…” where we can all help each other out!
The ipod touch didn’t have an onboard camera till the 4th generation. Still a fun story nonetheless.
If it brought you joy, especially repeated joy, none of your investment was wasted. Thanks for sharing that with us.
I still have a cable with one of those very connectors in use today. Some will recall that a lot of stereos and clocks had those connectors built in to dock and charge your ipods on. I bought a 2007 Eclipse that didn’t support Bluetooth and I wanted to add it. I then bought a Bluetooth receiver designed to plug into those ipod connectors and a cable I could attach to the backend of my car stereo that had the same. I still have that car today and that wiring and Bluetooth receiver is still tucked away behind my dashboard, working as well as it did almost 20 years ago when installed.