I’ve been back home for about a month now and my wife and I been snooping through some of my childhood boxes of collectibles. Found my abundance in collectible game figures, bunch of other fun stuff and a fully functioning iPod Touch 3rd gen. Sadly, I must’ve gone through that thing prior to tossing it in the box because there wasn’t anything fun left on there. Some wonky music choices, but that’s about it.
Anyways, blabbering aside, this 1st gen had a bent charging pin and I managed to bend that back and get it to at least take the charger. Once I plug it in, it shows the Apple logo, flashes it and turns right back off.
Which screams dead battery. But… I now have it in DFU mode and it’s asking me to connect it to a computer with iTunes. I currently only have access to this Macbook with OS 26 something on there. Latest iTunes works on OS 10.w/e and lower apparently.
So, I take it iTunes is out of the question. Data recovery aside, because I’ve no idea what’s on there, I’m curious to get this thing to work or at least allow me to get into its file system to at least see IF there’s anything left on here.
I, personally, besides this Macbook my wife wanted me to have, have not been an Apple user since.. iPhone 4? I don’t remember, maybe I had a 5.
It’s been a while, I feel like a 60 year old using old tech and I was hoping that maybe some folk over here had some luck messing with iPods or know their ways around.
This is the screen I currently managed to have open using 3uTools;
Hunch is the memory cells holding critical bootloader / firmware are likely bitrotted to the point they can’t support live updates. Might be possible to force program using contact pins to internal chips but unlikely to work over USB because software from those cells needs to be accessible and functional.
I could be wrong of course and you simply have too new of a system to bother with such old tech. Apple is famous for abandoning even slightly old platforms.
When apple discontinued iTunes on macOS, they moved pretty much all the iPod features into either finder or music. My gen1 iPod touch in DFU mode shows up right away in finder for a firmware restore.
Someone at apple keeps refusing to let iPod support die and they are a hero.
Yeeaa, is what I’ve come down to for now as well, tried some yesterday, about 4 more hours today. My attention span can only last for so long if I don’t have all my needed tools or actual PC to keep trying. T’was fun while it lasted for the time being, I’m saving this baby and she’s going directly back in the box of old consoles. For another day.
Mine so far does as well, but despite their heroic actions of not letting that dialog pop-up, it’ll keep saying their servers can’t be reached and tell me to get bent basically. What if this iPod contains some banger music from 2008 I’ve forgotten about. What if it’s saved my Safari browsing history and what did my 16 year old self Google. I’d love to find out. Regardless, getting it to work again would be cool. Even if that meant losing all data. T_T
Is this in finder on macOS or the iPod itself? If on the iPod itself: gen 1 iPod touch will need new certs to be installed in order to do any HTTPS/SSL connections as the one distributed in the official firmware are expired (unencrypted connections still work).
Apple for sure still makes iPod firmware (and legacy iOS) available. I think the only iPods not supported in macOS 26 are iPod classic gens 1~3, but that has more to do with the loss of firewire support.
Speaking of firewire tho, if the issue is just that the battery is so cooked that it won’t boot up: you might be able to bring it back to life with a firewire powered 30 pin charger/cable. They put out more power than the USB variants and the gen 1 touch still supported charging from it (but not syncing iirc).
So far, only thing I’ve gotten in Finder is that when the screen shows the Cable to iTunes screen, Finder will pop up about three times before it finally decides to calm down and show me the screen that says it needs updated. You continue these prompts and it tells me it can’t connect to a server. I’d have to check but I don’t currently have it on me. But something along those lines.
I’ve also read that these things don’t like the USB-C to USB adapter either, to use the original 30-pin to USB instead of the OG cable connected to an adapter so that it fits this laptop. (Can we talk about the hatred I feel towards only having USB-C Ports on a laptop??? Kudos to 3.5 headphone jack though, I guess)
I might dig out the Mac Mini outta 2010 from the shed one of these days and grab a firewire cable instead, if I can find one in my cable box. Ought to find one.
Welp, looks like I was wrong about apple still serving legacy iOS. I must just have it cached since I get the same error on a different mac I tried with my iPod touch. I have downloaded firmware for iPod classic 5.5G and 6G in the past year through finder so maybe it’s just legacy iOS that is affected?
Regular A to C adapters should be good since they just connect to the USB2 contact points in the USB port. Working just fine for me.
Regardless, you can always go looking for a copy of a compatible version of iOS and option-click on the “Restore” option in finder to manually select that.
Someone is hosting the files on soruceforge iOS Time Machine download | SourceForge.net
Hash for 3.1.3 match and restoring from it worked on my first gen iPod touch.
I’d gotten a little further using your steps but for some odd reason, at about 17 to 24% of progress, it reboots and goes back to the same stuff. I have yet to try a different cable route, or the Windows route and set up a VM to run an older version of iTunes or anything.
I think for now, I’ma table this a little bit before I do anything that could potentially either brick (it even further?) or lose any data IF there is any data on there.
