Old Tech

I like to hang on to old technology for as long as possible.  I like squeezing as much life as I can out of a machine rather than buying the latest and greatest every eighteen months.  Old computers, old gaming systems, old accessories, you name it; I’m still running it.  This tendency has finally bitten me in the ass.

I have this second generation iPod Touch that I got off of eBay a couple of years ago.  I had run my old click wheel iPod into the ground from years of use: the hard drive was dying and the click wheel was getting flaky.  So I got a newer, certainly not new, toy to play with.  In the Touch I got a machine with a touch screen that can run apps from the app store, which meant I could push off getting a smart phone even further into the future. 

When I got the iPod it was running iOS 3.0.1.  I cracked it, installed Cydia, and then installed Backgrounder so I could have multitasking on the iPod before Apple allowed multitasking on an iPod.  Over time, Apple released further versions of iOS.  Currently, they’re on 5.1.1 with iOS 6 already demoed in June and scheduled for a fall release.  I hadn’t kept up with the releases on the iPod because I didn’t want to have to re-crack and reinstall third party items every time I updated the firmware.  Also, considering it was getting to be older technology, and the fact that Apple apparently doesn’t see the need to add a decent amount of memory to their devices, I didn’t want to slow the machine down with updates I didn’t need.   (But, do you see how thin it is?  It doesn’t even have a third dimension!  Careful not to cut your fingers off trying to feel the sides.)

Over the years, as the applications were updated, I lost access to app after app.  Last night I decided to bite the bullet and update the iPod to something newer.  This particular machine can only run up to iOS 4.2.1, so I hoped that would be recent enough to get me back to running the apps I used but lost.  I wrote down the names of all of the apps I wanted and set the iPod to update on an HP laptop running XP I scavenged from work three or four years ago.  I ran the update on my Windows laptop because it’s faster than my Mac.

Ah, my Mac.  You don’t have to go to Jurassic Park to see a living dinosaur, just come to my office.  This baby is a blue and white Mac with a Motorola G4 450 under the hood.  This screaming meanie wasn’t even top of the line when I bought her in 1999, yet she still chugs along.  I’m hanging on to this computer because, frankly, I don’t want to have to go through it and find the last thirteen years of files I might want to move over to a new machine and then actually move them all.

So, while the iPod is updating on the laptop, I’m on my Mac building a playlist with five or six gigs of music I’ll want to add once the update is complete.  iTunes does whatever it needs to do to the iPod: downloading the firmware, wiping the hard drive, performing the install, and doing all of the rebooting it feels is necessary.  Once that finished, I started reinstalling the apps I had before.  Most of them work, though the Spotify app requires iOS 5, which is never going to happen on this thing.  At least I got Pandora back. 

I plugged the iPod into the Mac to start copying the music and I see an error message with my all-time favorite error message: unknown error.  It was nice enough to give me an error code, the standard 1xE8000001 so at least I had something to Google.  A cursory search returned some stories about USB support which I knew couldn’t be right.  I’ve connected this particular iPod to this particular Mac on this particular USB port previously, so I know that works.

I decided to try the ol’ IT Crowd solution, which is the standard first step in resolving any hardware issue, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”  Reboot.

When the Mac came back and I tried to connect the iPod I finally received an error message that made some sense.  It claimed that I had the wrong version of iTunes installed to work with this iPod.  I’d need to install iTunes 10.1 or later.  That seemed like a simple enough solution.  However, when I ran the Mac’s software update, as well as the one within the iTunes app, I was told that my software is up to date.  Curious.

I did some more poking around on the internet to see what I could do about getting a newer version of iTunes installed.  That’s when I hit the bad news.  As stated before, this Mac has a Motorola G4 processor, not one of the newer, Intel models.  Apple has stopped development for these old machines and the most up to date operating system I can put on it is 10.4.11.  In order to run iTunes version 10.X I have to have at least MacOSX 10.5.X.  That’s never going to happen on this machine.

Because of this update I can’t use my iPod with my Mac.  I have no way to get my music from my Mac to my iPod.  I’ve rendered the iPod mostly useless.

Maybe it’s time for me to finally update my machine from twentieth century technology to twenty-first.  I am not looking forward to moving over forty gigs of music, thirteen years of digital photos, and a variety of other personal files I’ll have to round up.

In the meantime, I think I’ll try to find and reinstall some 3.X version of the iOS firmware.  Apple does not want people to roll back firmware updates, and certainly not to anything lower than 4.X, but this is the only way I will be able to get one of their devices to work with another of their devices.