I've had a Nano for the past 9-10 years, mostly for holding music and podcasts to play in the car. I've never had any issues with it until today, when it appears to have completely died.

The question I'm have now is...am I correct in surmising that it is impossible to buy an MP3 player that does not hook up to the internet? It's not a feature that I thought I ever wanted or needed--everything I did as far as adding or removing content from the Nano, I did through Itunes on my laptop.

Is this what I needed to understand back when Apple announced something about getting rid of Itunes--that after such-and-such a date, one will only be able to use Itunes on touch-screen "devices", rather than a laptop or desktop computer?

Or is it still possible to buy a new, non-Apple MP3 player that synchronizes with Itunes and can be played in my 2007 automobile using a cord that runs between auxiliary port and the headphones port?

I'm not opposed to buying one of the newer Ipods, but I don't want to get roped into have to give Apple my credit card number just to register it online so that I can use it to play my personal MP3 stash.

I believe the current iPod touch does not require an internet connection.

I found an article about a year old that said the following were compatible with itunes.

Astell & Kern AK70
Onkyo DP-X1
Questyle QP1R DAP
Astell & Kern AK Jr
Pioneer XDP-300R
Sony Walkman NW-ZX2
Flio X7
PonoPlayer
Sony Walkman NWZ-A15

I don't use a Windows machine to interface with my iPod (which is an iPod Touch 6), but I don't have the newest Mac OS, so I still use iTunes with it. As I recall, they still had Windows users using iTunes to work with their iPods. Nowadays my iPod syncs with iTunes (on my Mac) over the WiFi, which is certainly handier than plugging it in...but I don't know if that works the same way with Windows.

The only iPod that you can buy nowadays (new, anyway) is the iPod Touch 7, which does all the app stuff that an iPhone does. You need an Apple account to buy any apps, but I don't know if you need to give them a credit card number in order to get free apps and to just use the device for surfing the Web and checking mail and such (over WiFi). What I certainly do not do is use the Apple Music online streaming stuff...I just use it to play music that I have put on the iPod from iTunes (although mostly what I use it for is playing audiobooks with the Audible app and listen to podcasts with the Overcast app).

It does. I use Windows, and I still use iTunes to sync with my old iPod Classic.

Out of curiousity, do you accept the updates to the program? Ever since Apple discontinued iPod and moved away from this platform, I've been afraid to accept updates.

FWIW, while I don’t have an iPod Classic, the latest version of iTunes (on Mac OS anyways) still works with the original iPod touch.

I haven't upgraded the last update, but I tend to update a few versions later anyway, so I don't know.

Well, I bought an Ipod Touch and screwed with it a few hours before getting it to do what the old Nano did. I tuned it into the internet just long enough to download I-tunes (you'd think it would have already be installed, but no), loaded up the music, and was good to go. For the most part, I like it better, except for one thing--this crap where I have to enter a PIN number (not a password, a PIN number) every time I want to go to a different playlist or something.

The new challenge is trying to figure out how to watch HBO Max on our so-called "smart" TV. My wife subscribes through her Ipad, and I can watch it on my laptop (I haven't, but I could.) However (and despite the fact that to get the TV to play Blu-rays I had to give Roku my credit card number) it appears that either she needs to open up a Gmail account or else I need to get on my phone and somehow hook up my Gmail (from a school I last attended in 2011) to HBO (I can't do it from my laptop because apparently HBO is only for people who prefer touchscreens to actual keyboards). What happens next, I don't know, because I can't determine whether "Chromecast" is an "app" or a "device". I suppose that if I go back and turn on the internet on this new Ipod, I could probably create some sort of Apple TV account, hook it into HBO, but the fact of the matter is that I just don't care.

And I still don't know what the hell Roku even is; all I know is that after I sent them several dozen insulting e-mails over the course of eighteen months, they finally admitted that there was "no active subscription" associated with my e-mail address. (But I still see their logo every time I turn on the set.)

I think I can ask Siri to play a new Playlist without unlocking the iPod Touch.

You have a Roku smart TV...and don't know what Roku is? Roku is the smart TV software. They sell TV's and also set top boxes that you can hook up to a "dumb" TV.
All you need is to install the HBO app on your Roku TV, enter your wife's login info, and watch HBO. They recently did have a dispute but as I understand the app is available now on Roku TV/streaming devices.

You don't need to know or care what a Chromecast is, or involve your phone, laptop, or tablets in the process. Just install the app on your TV, log in, done.

Actually no--when I enter my wife's password, we can watch HBO Now on the TV, not HBO Max. To watch HBO Max you need the HBO Max App.

Ah, that's the dispute I was remembering. Apparently the HBO Max app is the one that was not yet on the Roku, but will be this month. Still, the same process involved with installing that app on the Roku, when available. You won't need your phones, tablet, or ipod to do that.

Hmm...When I had a Nano, I could subscribe to podcasts through Itunes, download or delete episodes through the Itunes interface at will, and listen to them in my car, no problem. Yet when I tried stockpiling a bunch of podcasts for an extended drive I made this week...most of them wouldn't even frigging play--I got a popup saying that they were "unavailable", or a message saying that I had no internet connection. Quite a bit of fun to deal with while driving.

What am I missing now? If I want to listen to a podcast in my car as I drive from one state to the next, I need to somehow have an internet connection the whole way? Is that even possible? And what happened to all the episodes that I tried to download and save (and why could I not get rid of episodes I tried to delete)? What the hell sort of "upgrade" is this, anyway? The Nano handled all of this stuff for a decade without a problem--and without internet. This sucks--if I have to give Apple a goddamned screen name and password or enter some goddamned PIN number just to listen to a free podcast (probably with ads) then I'm just not not going to listen.

You have an iPod Touch, right? I no longer use iTunes to listen to podcasts. I use an app named Overcast. I search for and subscribe to podcasts within the app, and set the subscribed podcasts to download over the WiFi connection automatically when they come out (or manually download episodes from the back catalogs of the podcasts). Once downloaded, the podcasts can be played while the iPod is not connected to WiFi.

What I like about Overcast is that is has a feature that cuts out pauses in the podcasts... I don't really notice that things sound different, but it manages to save a not insignificant amount of time from each podcast.

It's much handier than having to connect to iTunes to get podcasts.

I could be misreading but it sounds like he does not want to log into an Apple account in order to access the app store, which means he cannot install such things.

Well, that's silly. The app is free. Oh, I think it has extra features that you can pay for, but I never use them.

I have had an Apple account for decades, and Apple has never charged me for anything I didn't want. Why own such an amazing device if you aren't going to make it do wonderful things?

But, if I'm not being useful here, I'll bugger off.

I just download or even play podcasts directly on my phone with LTE and the phone connected to Bluetooth.

The app was already on the Ipod. The podcasts to which I subscribed were all showing up on the screen. The problem is that they would not play--I would get a popup saying "Episode unavailable" or "Not connected to internet".

Did you actually download the eps? That's happened to me a couple times, even with podcasts that I subscribe to. The episode shows up in your list at home, but when you lose wifi, the episode is unavailable. And yes, I hate when that happens.

Same here. And now that they are trying to push everything to the cloud, it is harder to tell.

It's even happened a few times on my desktop - I thought I had an ep downloaded and it was pulling it from online.