{"id":1206,"date":"2026-07-09T16:43:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T16:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2026-07-09T16:43:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T16:43:36","slug":"the-newest-way-to-go-analog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1206","title":{"rendered":"The Newest Way to Go Analog"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When the iPod Nano was first released, in 2005, it cost $199 and was sold on the promise of limitlessness. This year, Celeste Stange bought her magenta 8-gigabyte model on eBay for $69 and the exact opposite reason. Every time she\u2019d pick a song on Spotify to stream, she\u2019d think about the millions of other songs she could listen to instead and get paralyzed by musical FOMO, she told me. \u201cNow I only have what\u2019s on here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Louis C.K.\u2019s Return to Normalcy<\/a><\/p>\n

Stange, who is 29, is part of a recent \u201canalog\u201d movement in which people\u2014usually those in Gen Z\u2014opt for less distracting alternatives to their \u201ceverything\u201d device. Those alternatives are not always, in fact, analog, but are in many cases older digital devices: an iPod, a digital Canon PowerShot, a DVD player. Tiffany Ng, the 25-year-old author of the newsletter Cyber Celibate, now has a first-generation iPhone, an 11-year-old iPod, two CD players, a Walkman radio, and a 1986 Macintosh Plus that takes 45 seconds to load the \u201cWelcome to Macintosh\u201d screen.<\/p>\n

Ng lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 20 years ago, the word analog<\/em> would\u2019ve conjured hipsters getting into vinyl. The argument then was that a record player produced real, textured music in a way an iPod\u2019s digital files could not. But today, people are \u201cgoing analog,\u201d as they call it, to escape devices that offer endless options, in favor of those that offer a modicum of constraint.<\/p>\n

The iPod\u2019s original tagline\u2014\u201c1,000 songs in your pocket\u201d\u2014suggested that you could dance like the carefree silhouettes in the ads because you didn\u2019t have to lug around CDs. This was the era when technology was \u201cconvenient, but not connected,\u201d Tony Fadell, a former senior vice president at Apple who is known as the \u201cfather of the iPod,\u201d told me; then the iPod became the iPhone, which soon had an app store, and convenience and connectivity became inextricably linked. People had their library of songs, but now they also had app notifications and Angry Birds and Instagram posts from that girl they went to middle school with. Eventually, streamable Apple Music replaced iTunes, and tens of thousands of songs became 100 million songs. \u201cI can\u2019t go through all of it,\u201d Stange said.<\/p>\n

Stange could still carve out her own corner of Spotify through playlists, but on her Nano, she truly has only music she chooses, with artist photos she uploads manually. For many people, that little bit of added friction is part of the appeal. Jess Fisher, a 29-year-old actor in Los Angeles, now buys new CDs each month, which she puts on her Innioasis Y1, an iPod-esque MP3 player that the company started making in 2023, after users complained that their touch-screen MP3 devices were too distracting. \u201cI am more excited about music because I am restricting myself from it,\u201d she told me. When we spoke, she\u2019d just gotten a new CD. \u201cI\u2019m going to sit down and listen to it and relish it, because I\u2019ve been waiting a week to get it.\u201d She also looks forward to the five free weekly MP3 downloads she gets with her library card, through a music site called Freegal. She has an alert set to repeat every Monday: \u201cIt\u2019s Freegal Time!\u201d<\/p>\n

I spoke with nearly a dozen people trying out similar technology. Isaac Mosna, who creates YouTube videos about tech under the handle Canoopsy, started taking photographs on a first-generation iPhone because he was nostalgic for a time when \u201ceverything was a little more physical and real.\u201d (The older camera also makes the pictures look warmer, he said.) Others told me about their Nintendo DSes and emulators they\u2019d filled with vintage games, so they could play without distractions. These choices have become popular enough that they\u2019re juicing secondhand markets for older tech. On eBay, people searched iPod<\/em> 1,300 times an hour on average last year, and prices of certain models are up by more than 50 percent, according to data provided by the site. Back Market, a refurbished-technology company, started carrying iPods, Game Boys, and other retro tech after a limited run of Nokia 3310 phones (which can basically be used only to call, text, and play Snake) sold out much faster than expected, Thibaud Hug de Larauze, the company\u2019s CEO, told me.<\/p>\n

Read more Tennis\u2019s New Golden Age<\/a><\/p>\n

For at least some people buying into this trend, the logic goes something like: I get a DVD player, therefore I learn how to exist comfortably in the present moment. Ng has been replacing a different modern piece of technology with its older counterpart every month, an experiment she began after her iPhone broke. For the five or so hours that the Genius Bar was repairing it, she \u201cfelt so, so stupid.\u201d She didn\u2019t have a way to tell time. She didn\u2019t know how to get around Manhattan without Google Maps. She decided then that she wanted to know she could live without modern technology. When she posted a newsletter titled \u201cI chained my phone to a wall for a week,\u201d people DMed her to ask where she\u2019d bought the chain. (It was an old belt.)<\/p>\n

Going \u201canalog\u201d is also one of the few ways to own an actual copy of a song, a movie, or a game these days. And buying those products means a person has to commit to their own taste more than they would by just pressing \u201cPlay\u201d on \u201cFun Upbeat Mix\u201d curated by Spotify. \u200b\u200bIt has given Stange the ability to say, \u201cI\u2019m not going to pretend that Geese is the second coming of God\u201d just because everyone else is listening to them. She\u2019d gotten so used to streaming, though, that she wasn\u2019t sure what to put on her iPod at first. She looked up a Rolling Stone<\/em> \u201cGreatest Albums\u201d list and downloaded some of the recommendations. Fisher did the same.<\/p>\n

A CD or DVD is more work to buy and can physically break down in a way a Spotify playlist cannot, but the people I spoke with generally framed those inconveniences as part of the experience. \u201cIf I want to listen to an album that I really love, it involves me spending maybe $20 on a CD, it involves me putting that CD on, it involves me using the physical remote,\u201d Mosna said\u2014it\u2019s \u201can experience.\u201d (Cleaning and maintaining his CD player is a bit of a pain, though.) Dan Cohen, a 24-year-old fashion designer, told me his professors couldn\u2019t imagine why anyone would want the cross-body CD holder he\u2019d made for his undergraduate thesis: They\u2019d lived through the annoyance of CDs getting scratched, iPods crashing and deleting music, and DVDs getting stuck on their menu pages for eternity. And some of these devices were outmoded for a reason. Ng, the newsletter writer, got the 1986 Macintosh in part to play around with PageMaker and its word processor, but she\u2019s still trying to figure out exactly how to use the computer.<\/p>\n

After all, modern \u201canalog\u201d enthusiasts still have backups. Everyone I talked with had kept their smartphone. When Stange and I met, she took out her magenta Nano and her laptop, to show me how she downloaded her music onto the iPod. The Nano promptly died. She plugged it into the laptop to charge, but still, no dice. \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure it broke on the way here,\u201d she said, and told me she\u2019d need to figure out how to fix it. She sounded a little excited about the challenge. In the meantime, she still had her Spotify subscription.<\/p>\n

*Illustration sources: Adam Rountree \/ Bloomberg \/ Getty; Jaap Arriens \/ NurPhoto \/ Getty; Jacobs Stock Photography \/ Getty; liangpv \/ Getty; Nick Dolding \/ Getty; trumzz \/ Getty; Yoshikazu Tsuno \/ AFP \/ Getty.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more What if It\u2019s Not the Phones?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Digital devices from a less connected era are getting a second life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Newest Way to Go Analog - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1206\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Newest Way to Go Analog - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Digital devices from a less connected era are getting a second life.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1206\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-09T16:43:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Newest Way to Go Analog\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-09T16:43:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206\"},\"wordCount\":1310,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/714e4edf57e2a2a33d5ea2ed3251bb39.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Health\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1206\",\"name\":\"The Newest Way to Go Analog - 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