Apple sealed the iPod shut, and hackers have been prying it open ever since
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I recently found my old iPod Video, and it still works. More importantly, it still has the version of Most Precious Blood’s “So Typical My Heart” with original vocalist Tom Sheehan singing. I’ve been toying with the idea of modding the iPod so it works with wireless headphones. I probably never will, but it’s fun to think about.
That itch has followed the iPod for its entire life. Apple built a sealed music player, and people spent the next two decades prying it open to see what else it could do. PopSci was right there with them with our ever-present willingness to void warranties.
The best example ran in the July 2011 issue. Vin Marshall built a tube-amp iPod dock that paired Apple’s music player with amplifier tech that peaked half a century earlier. In a tube amp, a small signal applied to the tube’s grid controls a much larger current, and that current drives the speaker. Marshall conceded that solid-state amps beat tubes on cost, size, and reliability, but that’s not the point. People still love tubes for their warm sound and orange-yellow glow, and his build leaned into both.
All in, the project cost about $400. Marshall started with S-5 Electronics’ 16LS amplifier kit, added an off-the-shelf iPod dock, and mounted everything in an aluminum enclosure from Hammond Manufacturing. He didn’t have to design a circuit. Most of the labor went into drilling holes and mounting parts. The finished amp worked with a remote, and while it wasn’t especially loud, it had no trouble filling a living room.
Docking the iPod did more than hold it upright. Apple’s 30-pin connector, which arrived with the third-generation iPod in 2003, carried a line-level audio signal, so the amp got its music before it passed through the iPod’s tiny headphone amplifier. You don’t have to be a snobby audio purist to notice the difference in quality this path provided.
That connector didn’t have much time left. Apple replaced it with Lightning in September 2012, about 15 months after Marshall’s build went online, and a generation of 30-pin docks started its slow migration to thrift store shelves.
Marshall’s project has aged better than the connector. He posted his schematic, bill of materials, and assembly instructions on GitHub, and they’re still up. As of September 2026, TubeDepot still lists the 16LS kit at $349.95, which would eat most of Marshall’s original budget on its own.
Two years earlier, Laura Silver took a more musical route in New music from an old iPod. At an Eyebeam workshop in New York, she installed ipodLinux and pdPod, a port of the open-source audio language Pure Data, and turned an early iPod into a pocket drum kit. She found the iPod at a Lower East Side recycling center, learned the hard way that third-generation models needed FireWire instead of USB to power up, and later turned the empty case into a snack container. Remember FireWire? Good times.
The experts at that workshop told Silver the newer, slimmer iPods were nearly hackproof. That turned out to be half right. Hackers cracked the first iPod touch within about a month of its September 2007 launch, and jailbreaking grew into a hobby of its own.
Hard-drive iPods got bigger guts. By 2009, you could upgrade an old iPod to 240GB with a Toshiba drive that cost more than $300 by itself. Once the touch picked up cameras with the 2010 iPod lineup, retired models eventually found second lives as free home security cameras.
Apple discontinued the iPod classic in 2014 and the iPod touch, its last iPod, in May 2022. The tinkering didn’t stop. Axios reported that eBay searches for the iPod classic rose 25 percent from January through October 2025 compared with the same stretch of 2024. Modders now replace spinning hard drives with microSD cards through iFlash adapters and install batteries with several times the original capacity. Rockbox, the open-source firmware that has run on iPods for about 20 years, reached version 4.0 in 2025.
That brings me back to my wireless headphones. Moonlit’s Classic Connect 2 kit adds Bluetooth 5.2 and USB-C charging to the fifth- and 5.5-generation iPod Video, and the core install doesn’t require soldering. The company estimates the whole job takes 10 minutes. That puts a lot of pressure on “I probably never will.”
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