My kids all have Google Home units in their rooms, which they use to play music, listen to podcasts, and set alarms and timers. Although Google is decent at returning song requests, it struggles with podcasts, let alone specific episodes. A typical interaction goes something like this:
My six year-old daughter: “Hey Google, play the podcast “Have I Got a Story for You?”
Google: “Sure, no problem! Playing ‘Gold Digger’ by Kanye West.”
This is, as you can probably understand, not ideal.
And since my kids typically listen to podcasts when they get into bed, I’ll usually just bring my phone upstairs and select the podcast for them. It’s not a huge deal, but it can be a bit of multistep process, which is sometimes made more fraught when my daughters are wrangling over which podcast episode they have only listened to 146 times.
In order to cast the podcast or music to the Google, I need to connect to our upstairs network, cue up my Spotify, select a given episode, and then wait the few seconds until Google goes b-rrrrring and starts playing the episode. Except for the 10% of the time when it inexplicably doesn’t work and you need to start the process over as your daughters grow increasingly impatient.
Last week was one of those times: I spent nearly five full minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t successfully cast the audio from my phone to my daughters’ Google Home, and succeeded on the third try, after re-connecting to the wifi, restarting Spotify, and unplugging the Google Home unit.
I clomped downstairs and said to my wife “You know, I kind of wish you could just hit a button and the podcast would play.”
My wife said, “do you mean like an iPod?”
“Yeah,” I said, “exactly like an iPod.”
Now, coincidentally, my wife recently rediscovered her 2004 iPod Mini, which we’ve placed on a bookshelf in our study — alongside another antique: a 1947 California license plate — and which our children have found an endless source of facination. They can’t get over the scroll wheel and tactile home button.
But all of this points to an interesting trend I’ve noticed:
Millennial parents who grew up with cassette players and CD players and mp3 players and now iPhones, are looking for “retro,” single-purpose devices for their kids. You know — kind of like an iPod.
I’ve noticed three examples lately in three different kinds of media, though I’m sure there are dozens more:
YOTO Players: Card-based podcast players
Tin can: Wifi-based landline for kids
Camp Snap: Screen-free digital cameras — originally aimed at kids, but now marketing more squarely toward millennials and Gen Z who want to go screen free.
In each case, these single-feature devices are aimed at squarely at millennial parents who want to delay our kids immersion into the worlds of screen and apps and social media and all the attendant complexity that entails. And, as my wife also noted, these devices do so, while also evoking a nostalgia of childhood — ours and our parents.
The branding, of course, leans into that: there’s a 90’s charm to Tin Can — notice the MS Paint star and deliberately lo-fi hero image? And that name? It’s so good.
Yoto’s mid-page graphic suggests morning in America, circa 1957. Replace the device with a box of Wheaties or a Motorola transistor radio and it’d match pretty darn well.
And Camp Snap is a clever callback to 50’s-style branding (that font is straight off of a highway diner), though it does break the fourth wall by actually using the word “nostalgia.”
What makes this branding interesting is that, in many cases, these brands borrow visual concepts from the 1950s through the 70s, a wide swath of time regarded as simpler and wholesome — never mind the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union — but still safely before any millennials were actually born.
And yes, even the nineties — with our signature dial-up sound and our parents’ Motorola flip phones and Day-Glo windbreakers — has begun its inexorable shift into the incandescent embrace of a generalized idyllic midcentury vision of pre-iPhone America — even if the decade was a full forty years after checkerboard tablecloths had been wiped clean.
It will be interesting to see how technology and society move. Maybe more of these nostalgically-tinged, single-use, parents-in-mind devices will come out — for television; for watches, for radio, for flashlights?
But if Apple re-releases the iPod, by golly I’ll sign up. As soon as I untangle my headphones.
Silicon Spatula 