this is an iPod and probably one of the best ones Apple ever made in this video I want to talk about what made this particular one so good and it's also pretty beat up so I'll be getting my hands dirty making it as good as new and even modding it to make it better than ever before let's Jump Right In I might be biased because I grew up in the 2000s but there aren't many pieces of tech that truly left a cultural mark on the world as much as the IP pod beyond the flashy TV ads and huge Billboards especially living in New York City at the time it was hard to walk 10 ft without seeing those white earbuds in someone's ear they didn't look like a nerdy tech product like other MP3 players of the time iPods were the definition of trendy and cool coming off the heels of CDs the idea that you can Stow hundreds of albums in a device smaller than a bfold wallet was was a big deal especially being in middle school with the power of DSL and lime wire on my side my excitement was through the roof when I finally got one for Christmas back then I had way more music than what I could realistically listen to and having access to it whenever I wanted was an amazing feeling now the iPod we're focusing on for this video is the 5.5 generation classic which is highly regarded as one of the best ones Apple has ever made it also happens to be the one that I grew up with not only did it have a beautiful 2.5 in color LCD display but it also let you play videos as well mine had a whole two seasons of Futurama on it which I actually still own on iTunes but most importantly for you audio files the 5.5 generation is highly sought out because of its wolves and Dack while sound quality is subjective through the headphones compared to the the Cirrus Source dacks found in most other iPods and iPhones through the years the wolson Dack has a warmer Cozier sound signature which I tend to prefer for chill listening sessions all in all this iPod is a good platform to relive our Nostalgia but what kind of condition are we looking at with this iPod for our glowup so I bought this iPod Classic 5.5 on eBay for about 47 bucks and it's pretty beat up now the front's actually not too bad with the shiny black plastic you can see some scratches and deeper Cuts here but where it's most egregious is on the back with the stainless steel but that's why we're here I want to refurb this device to the best of my ability and I have some accessories to improve the quality of life in both Aesthetics but also functionality you're not going to break this one right yeah I know we did the PSX a couple of weeks ago and I didn't see success with that refurb job this thing for some reason is not powering on anymore but I do think that with a little bit of care this would be a much better refurb and upgrade process so what do we have to actually make our iPod better well for one I want to replace the battery because the battery life on this was okay for the time but with a 3,000 milliamp hour cell we're going to get some serious play time we're talking I think some people are saying around 15 to 18 hours on a single charge I Luca's giving me the face I know right something that this iPod also had was a physical hard drive with a spinning disc and all but these days we have flash storage with high capacities and so I got myself one of these this is an I flash solo these are pretty common in the iPod community and what this essentially lets me do is replace this physical spinning hard drive with an SD card of my choice however what I'm most excited about is to upgrade the Aesthetics I've leaned into some color which is something that the iPod Classic never really did so so I got myself not only a yellow click wheel but I also have a yellow front plate o look at that but most importantly I want to replace this back shell which is pretty beat up black and normal silver stainless steel option here as well and they both actually have 128 gig labeled on the back to match our SD card which is pretty sick so the beauty about tearing down an iPod is that it is very very well documented unlike our PSX so I have an iFix it tear down here just to help guide me along so that if there is something that I could potentially screw up I'll know about it ahead of time going to learn from my previous mistakes and actually use some guidance of the internet cuz we have that what yeah but don't you know I break you fix and so I began the tear down process it did take a moment to separate the front and back shells but eventually here we are there's a ribbon cable attaching the front shell and all of its components to the back plate so I'm going to be careful here but I think I could just straight up take some of this out cool this is like diffusing a bomb Oh so there's some like rubber gaskets here for the for the hard drive I guess next up I'm going to take out the hard drive which is connected by a ribbon cable and this is where our I flash solo is going to be connected as well as you can see it corresponds over there so there's a black retention thing I lift up and it freeze the hard drive this thing is Tiny wow that is thin I don't know how common it was to see these things in like external drives but uh at least on an iPod it makes sense man this whole thing is very sticky where the PSX was very dusty and I was like coughing and sneezing excuse me grab my Agnes in order to replace our front shell and the click wheel I needed to undo some screws in order to separate them from the chassis but this revealed a bit of the the true condition of our iPod Classic uh yeah these screws are rusted wow in fact there was so much rust that some of the screws just straight up wouldn't budge and since we absolutely needed to get this front plate off I'm just going to break that where the where it's screwed in it's not going to do anything cuz we're going to replace the shell anyway sucks but let's just do [Music] it click wheel button fell but that's okay all right so we're at the point where it's just our screen chassis main board and our click wheel attached first off let's take out the display before we try to disassemble our click wheel a little careful there we go cool sick nice so that's display out put this over here as well and with that I was able to start on our click wheel which was a bit more of an involved process than I was expecting you see beyond unplugging more ribbon cables after undoing that piece of tape I have to grab at this little tab over here which is basically just a ground fully detaching the click wheel requires separating the logic board aka the brains of our entire iPod from the main frame in order to get it free it required a little bit of force this don't feel right boy let's go look at this with our board off all that's left is one rimon cable nice we did it okay our click wheel is fully off and our board is seemingly intact with our original click wheel out we can swap in our brand new yellow one all right there's nothing for it let's just put our new click wheel in so there's adhesive on here to Redo what we took out earlier just undo that we'll connect the ribbon cable to its socket and it's in the lines as well there are um some nice guides on the PCB that shows us where it goes and it looks like it's uh where it's supposed to be before I even put this on the main frame maybe I try to hack at this to get our screw out with my handy dandy multi-tool it took a little bit of elbow grease but the screws finally came out thank God if not for that my shiny new face plate would have had to undergo some modifications which probably would have compromised the fit and finish which we don't want because I want this iPod to be perfect I cleaned up as much of the rust as I could with what I had on hand I think we're ready to put this iPod all back together the adhesive is still young yeah like you I'm older than you but you can still be young from here the reassembly process seemed very straightforward just do the opposite of what we did in the teardown place the PCB on the frame put the ribbons and tape back where they were connect the display to the board and then oh that's it it is in oh let's go iPod is IP poding at least from a button perspective and we have our protector here we just clean yeah buddy that looks nice that looks so nice this click wheel does feel a little little cheaper than the standard one but not by much the whole yellow iPod woo let's go nice yeah dust free in the lens oh we are golden wow all right so our front shell is all good to go now it's time to tackle the back one so not only are we going to replace this whole thing but what's captive here is our battery as well as our headphone jack so let's see what's involved here but it should be pretty straightforward initially I thought I would have to do some sort of components transplant between our old rear shell and the new one but to my surprise something I didn't expect was that our headphone jack assembly is actually already on here as well as our buttons and the rings around all of our ports so I guess now all I have to do is really put the battery in here and also install our I flash solo so ribbon cable goes in here pretty easily slide it in clip down and uh it's captive that could not be any more simpler oh oh my God this is just so perfectly machined I mean it just sits in our main frame perfectly to the point where it just is there there's no wiggle no play it's just that's impressive wow it's even spring-loaded well to a point there you go nice all right so ribbon cables in for our if flash solo that's all connected let's get our battery in so I did original order a 3,000 milliamp hour unit from AliExpress but it turns out that shipping on that is about 2 months away didn't think that was going to happen so I bought this guy off of Amazon only problem is that it has three stars on its reviews and I think that's because this ribbon cable supposedly is going the wrong way people have said that they have had to bend it in a weird orientation to make this work but uh I'll be the judge of that and let the record show that I was indeed the judge of that uh oh man yeah those those reviews weren't lying that's that's that's pretty bad okay well I'm going to do the bend later we're going to set it flat first flattish and then this goes in here like this oh that's going to be even more annoying we got our battery one hooked up which has a very awkward Bend once the whole device is closed up so we're going to tackle that a little later the one for our headphone jack I think is over here after some careful gymnastics to fit all of these components in it took a few tries but eventually oh wait there there there there that's it that's it oh we did it yo some of the plastic is shaving a little bit on its way in but apart from that bro that looks so good bro y that is it not too long after refurbishing and upgrading our iPod next thing I worked on was the software and for this project I installed a popular custom OS called Rockbox which allows you to do all kinds of neat stuff that Apple never let you do for example I like that you can customize the way that the UI looks with themes designed by the Rockbox Community there are plenty of them out there that actually build on Apple's design language to match the iPod nicely but if you're looking for a completely unique interface there are plenty of those available as well however probably my main reason for installing Rockbox in the first place place is because a vast majority of the music that I have archived are in lossless Flack format which iPods don't natively support out the box but when modded with Rockbox can play them totally fine best of all this makes loading music on the device very straightforward plug the iPod into a Mac PC or Linux computer and it'll simply appear as an external storage Drive regardless of how your files are organized as long as there's decent track metad data to go off of Rockbox indexes them into a database automatically without having to deal with iTunes which is pretty awesome having said all of that however the Rockbox experience isn't quite all rainbows and sunshine for one the ux isn't the most userfriendly thing Rockbox might have extra functionality but Apple absolutely killed it with the stock iPod interface in how simple and direct it is with more move moving pieces involved Rockbox is more prone to reliability issues I've had occasional performance stutters or straight up freezing probably due to the limited amount of processing power and RAM to handle things like the high fidelity flax or resource intensive themes whatever the issue is it's most certainly a buzz kill I mean don't get me wrong the novelty is fun but when I could just as easily switch back to my smartphone and Bluetooth earbuds this has to work flawlessly beyond that the Rockbox installation itself is kind of scuffed and while it's been around for over 20 years at this point sifting through generations worth of documentation on the wiki and the forums in order to troubleshoot problems that can arise can prove rather Troublesome it certainly doesn't help that the website looks and feels very outdated which isn't the most approachable thing out there when you're trying to fix things despite my issues however after a week of daily use I've rekindled my love for the iPod you see every now and then I like to disconnect from the internet to take a break from work and social media it turns out having a dedicated media player as someone that listens to music pretty regularly can help reduce the urge to grab my smartphone regular viewers of the channel already know that I mainly listen to J-pop and anime music artists so I loaded up a bunch of tracks that I'm currently listening to now as well as ones that I listen to back in high school since listening to an iPod naturally got me very nostalgic and truth be told it's a Vibe not only is the yellow iPod a fun visual Flex when going out to the mall or grabbing groceries but paired with my C Porter pros and that Wolfson Dak you get incredibly warm sound that pairs well with anything from electronic music to Rock It might not offer the most accuracy or detail but it's about sounding chill and laidback and that's what I like about it let me know in the comments if you would rock an iPod in 2023 and otherwise thanks for watching this video on Dany Channel