Apple has a reputation for not being afraid to move on.
Buy a new iPhone, and you’re lucky if iOS supports your device just four years down the line. Buy a Mac? Apple’s constantly making older models obsolete with every new OS X release. Heck, there’s an entire ocean of old PowerPC apps that were orphaned by Apple when they migrated to Intel.
Yet Apple isn’t without loyalty to the gadgets that once made it great. Case in point: If you plug a first-gen iPod into your modern-day Mac, iTunes 12 will still sync with it.
In this video by YouTube director Matthew Pearce, he plugged in an original iPod from 2001 into a Mac running iTunes 12.1 using a FireWire 400-to-800 adapter.
Surprised? It not only worked, but after connecting the device, iTunes 12.1 showed an icon for the original iPod in the sidebar, indicating that this 14-year-old backward compatibility is by design.
Pretty incredible, don’t you think?
Source: YouTube
Thanks: Josiah O.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
9 responses to “Who says Apple doesn’t care about backward compatibility?”
I wish the same was true for my older airport express devices I use for AirPlay around the house. It’s impossible to update their settings in Yosemite…
You can’t run AppleWorks on anything newer than 10.6 – case in point. When you have relied on this Apple-trusted office suite for years and have e thousands of legal documents needed everyday, you can’t just upgrade to a newer Macintosh – they won’t support Snow Leopard!! No PowerPC support at all!! No way to run AppleWorks! And migrating over 10,000 documents like this, some which just won’t-go, is a near impossible and frankly too time-daunting task to deal with. Apple dropped the ball on this one. They DID NOT DEVELOP APPLEWORKS FOR INTEL!!!
i’ll have to try that because i’ve been trying to get my iPod to sync up for months now and only get a folder with a question mark on it…
I’ve opened many cwk docs even yesterday and they open in Pages and can be saved as such. Some of the fonts don’t click buy they open and all. If you have legal docs, have someone do it for you or look and see if some app will convert them for you.
OBTW, I was on a friends iMac running 10.9
Well, I have two older iPods that won’t connect to iTunes any more. And my current, most recent Classic before they were discontinued required the software to be “upgraded” so now 90% of my music videos won’t play. I used the Classic as a mobile video server for events so that’s been crappy.
I recently plugged in a 10+ year old DV camcorder using a Firewire 400 to 800 adapter and today’s iMovie recognized it, controlled it, and imported the video from my digital tapes.
Who still uses a first gen ipod? They’re collector items now and the people who have one are selling them to collectors but not for daily use purpose. I’ve been a long time Apple user and yes I tend to see that Apple is horrible at backward compatibility, but my beef is with OS upgrades. A mac can usually last 2-3 OS X upgrades. After that you’ll have to buy a new one. When in the Windows world my friends can reliably run the latest Windows 8 OS on a computer more than 10 years old.