At Apple’s NYC Anniversary Event, Neo Buzz, iPod Nostalgia, and Alicia Keys

“I would still rock an iPod in my travel bag if I was going away,” Zane Lowe is saying. It’s Friday afternoon, and the Apple Music 1 host is in the crowd at an Apple event in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, waiting to watch Alicia Keys perform a surprise show in front of the Grand Central Apple Store in celebration of the tech giant’s 50th anniversary. We’re surrounded by a sea of iPhones, held up by influencers, media staffers, and ambiguously self-described “creatives” itching to get suitable clips for socials. Many don’t look old enough to have been able to buy the original iPhone, let alone the Macintosh, and yet most of the people I talked to about Apple-device nostalgia are in agreement with Lowe about the iPod. “I still like the idea of having a dedicated music device in my life,” Lowe continues. Which one? “I like the big one. The Nano is cool and stuff, but I like the original.”

Twenty-five years ago, at what’s now the halfway point of Apple’s existence, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod to the world at a keynote address. It was far from the first MP3 player on the market; the South Korean company SaeHan Information Systems had launched their MPMan F10 four years prior. But Jobs, long a proponent of innovation over invention, sought to dominate a category with no apparent leader. Before long, the iPod, advertised with the promise of “1000 songs in your pocket,” pushed its way ahead of the pack and amassed even more fans for the company with its successors (the Shuffle, the Nano, and the Touch, to name a few). It had no true competitor—until Apple debuted the iPhone, an uber-device that rendered the iPod obsolete. From then, the iPod declined in sales until Apple discontinued the iPod Touch in 2022, sounding the death knell for the MP3-player age.

For Gen Z, the iPod has come to represent a simpler, more optimistic technological era, when Silicon Valley seemed more akin to a Wild West for geeks than a breeding ground for techno-despots. Teenagers and twentysomethings have made a trend out of flaunting their “analog bags,” posting videos of their digicams, notebooks, and music players with loving anecdotes about their escape from the infinite scroll. There’s a charm in being able to lay out the contents of your life on a table rather than a home screen; your entertainment and leisure aren’t reliant on a single device’s battery power. At the Grand Central event, I reminisce with content creator Taylor Reed and his sibling Dylan about our iPod Nanos, our first Apple devices. Taylor’s was blue, Dylan’s was red, and mine was purple. “I love how small it is. You can put it anywhere in your pocket. It’s not cumbersome in your bag,” Taylor says.

Before the show, some of those creatives and influencers milled around the Campbell, a storied NYC watering hole tucked away in a corner of Grand Central, its stained-glass windows and dark velvet seats worlds away aesthetically from the organic minimalism of your average Genius Bar. (We were whisked away to the stage before capital-C celebs like Druski, Josh Safdie, and Dapper Dan arrived in the space for photo ops.) Most of the people I spoke to owned at least two Apple devices, sometimes more than that, but analog (in the petit-tech sense) was the word on everyone’s lips.

“The novelty of an iPhone was that everything’s in one place,” says Brooks Welch, a DJ and music curator. “But now we’re like, ‘That was too much. We’re overstimulated.’” She wistfully recalls the haptics of the iPod Nano’s click wheel, which subtly ticked when swiped. Diana Tsui, a creative consultant, agrees, adding, “Bring back the Shuffle! Because I see all the girls use them as hair clips, and I think that’s so cute.”