iPod Touch 6G

I’ve had my iPod touch for almost 5 years. It still works fine, but is getting slower and I’ve started having problems getting new apps since it will only run iOS 6 and they are now on iOS 8. If they had introduced a new improved version of the iPod touch last year when they rolled out the iPhone 6, I probably would have bought it, but Apple doesn’t sell too many iPods anymore and so they don’t refresh them very often. In fact, in the nearly five years I have had it, the only improvement is the 5G version introduced in 2012. I like the larger screen of the iPhone 6 and hoped maybe this Fall they would come out with a larger screen version of the iPod touch. Instead, Apple came out with a new iPod in July. That’s perfect because I broke the screen in June and was going to wait until September to see if there was a product refresh or if I should just have the screen repaired (again, I also broke it a couple of years ago).

Apple didn’t go with a bigger screen on the 6G iPod touch, but they did improve the camera, already greatly improved over the camera in my 4G. And they have dramatically improved the processor speed. The screen is about a half inch taller, so there is a slight improvement there. And they also lowered the price of the 64 GB version by $100. So pretty much I knew I would buy one that day. The only question was the color. They have space gray, silver, gold, blue, pink, and red. If you buy the red version, they make a donation to fight AIDS in Africa and I bought a red iPod nano a few years ago. The silver, gold, and gray versions are all too stately, so I bought the blue one. If you buy from Apple’s website you get free engraving, so I had it engraved with my name and phone number in case I lose it. That meant it took another week to arrive, but it arrived from Shanghai on Wednesday.

I wasn’t sure how to move everything from the old iPod to the new one. iTunes should take care of it, but I have a lot of apps and I wasn’t sure if I had to buy a new copy of each for the new iPod (I don’t; just like I don’t have to buy new versions of the songs). Further complicating matters, the new iPod needs the latest version of iTunes, version 12, but that requires Windows 7 or better and my iTunes was on my old desktop with Windows XP. So first I had to move my iTunes over to my laptop, which runs Windows 8.1 (soon to be Windows 10). Apple has help for all of this, but I wasn’t sure how it would work. I have a lot of music in a folder on the root of my C: drive, so the path to that should be the same, but the path to Windows 8.1’s Music folder is different than the path to Windows XP’s My Music folder. Fortunately it seems to have picked that up. I’m still missing a few songs and I didn’t get any of my videos which were stored in a separate folder on my root drive (once I got those in place, iTunes picked those up; still need to find a few songs). I think the biggest challenge was starting the new iPod and doing a restore from backup. I missed it a few times and had to reset the iPod to start all over again. I had done a backup on the old iTunes installation, but I needed to do one on the new iTunes before that option was available.

Then it was pretty neat. All my apps were in place on the new iPod, all of my pictures, contacts, notes, databases, preferences, and even my wallpaper and icon layout (for the most part; Apple added some new icons with iOS 7 and 8). The biggest problem I have, still unresolved, is with Wiki Offline, the app that contains the contents of Wikipedia. They came out with an all new app for iOS 8 called Wiki Offline 2, which is also $10, but now instead of charging 99 cents to upgrade the 4 GB Wikipedia dump, they charge $5 for a yearly subscription. I only updated about once a year, so that’s not as good a deal, but the bigger concern was that the database didn’t come over with the install and it also wouldn’t download a new version. This is one of my favorite features of the iPod, being able to take Wikipedia with me, so I paid $10 for the new version. But then I realized that I had automatically been upgraded to the new version for free and it just didn’t work. I sent a request to Apple support for a refund, but now I don’t have Wikipedia. And the other apps that do something similar seem to have gone away or are no longer being maintained: one has a Wikipedia dump from 2013. Instead I downloaded a Wikipedia app to my Nexus 7 which I’ll write about later. That’s still not great because I rarely have the Nexus with me and I almost always have the iPod.