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How to upgrade an iPod for 2018 with flash memory and a new battery

How to upgrade an iPod for 2018 with flash memory and a new battery

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Bring back the iPod with some style

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Apple’s iPod is probably the pinnacle of personal audio devices. Sure, Android and iOS phones can play music with their fancy streaming services and gigabytes of storage, but nothing beats the elegant style, refined design, and tactile click wheel of a classic iPod.

Using an iPod in 2018 can be rough, however: 30GB of storage on a hard drive with slow speeds and annoying skipping isn’t a good user experience, no matter how nice Apple’s hardware is. Fortunately, we can fix that with a little DIY hacking to turn your humble old iPod back into the supercharged portable music player it once was.

Turn your humble old iPod back into the supercharged portable music player it once was

That’s exactly what we did this week on Circuit Breaker Live. Follow along in the video to see how it’s done and revel in the magic of having an iPod with 250GB of reliable, fast flash storage. (And a new battery, which you might as well replace while you’re cracking the case open.)

If you’re interested in building your own upgraded iPod for yourself, here’s what you’ll need:

An old iPod (a fifth-generation iPod Video works best, and it has the added bonus of offering a Wolfson DAC, which is considered to be the best ever shipped on an iPod)

  • An iFlash adapter, which houses your SD cards, Compact Flash drives, or SATA drives and connects where your old hard drive used to go (available on eBay)
  • Some flash memory (either SD, microSD, Compact Flash, or SATA, depending on your personal preference)
  • A new battery (iFixit is a good place to get reliable ones)
  • An opening tool to pry open the iPod (again, iFixit has them)

Then, it’s as simple as cracking open the iPod, carefully removing the power and headphone cables, swapping the battery, swapping the hard drive, reattaching all the wiring, and snapping things back together. One quick iTunes restore later, and you’ll be good to go!

If all that seems a little confusing, feel free to follow along with our live run-through in this week’s episode.

For more gadgets, check out the full episode of Circuit Breaker Live on YouTube. New episodes air live every Tuesday at 4PM ET over on The Verge’s YouTube channel.