Realistically, you’re gonna have to get her a phone of some sort. Almost nothing that supports Apple Music is gonna be magically unable to install other apps in one way or another.

Sony’s Walkmans might be your best compromise since the iPod Touch is dead. It’s an Android, wifi only, device and you can set it up with Family Link to try to lock it down somewhat. Similarly, an iPhone SE is cheap, and you can lock a lot down with parental controls.

Just be aware that kids are smart, and no lock that you can put on the device is truly foolproof. You do have to have some level of trust in them that they’re not gonna do anything stupid.

Alternatively, go the old-fashioned route and just buy an actual MP3 player. The Walkman NWE394 is still available, and the iPod Classic is still available if you look on eBay. You’d obviously have to buy music again and work with her to get the songs she wants, but that would solve the problem.

Unfortunately, MP3 players are effectively dead since they serve no purpose in a world of smartphones.

My guess is Apple will announce 3-6 titles as a collaboration with some developers, rave about how M3 brings the power for high-end gaming, roll the games out, and they’ll do reasonably well. Then, Apple will promptly forget about gaming entirely until next year and do the same thing when they need something to put in the keynote…

Please, Apple doesn’t have to be the best at everything, and it’s fine to say they got blindsided. Everyone other than OpenAI / Microsoft was surprised at how good GPT4 is at a lot of tasks.

Apple straight up isn’t a machine leaning company. Let’s not beat around the bush. Sure, they have the neural engine and some acceleration used in iPhones, but every phone on the market ships with that. It’s not some unique innovation like large language models and transformers have been. Siri is a great example here.

Apple is behind because this isn’t something they’ve seen a reason to care about beyond image processing. It’s fine because the sooner they admit that, the sooner they can work on a solution that actually is competitive. Let’s not blindly give Apple a pass in something that Meta and Google are already scrambling for, and OpenAI is actively thrashing everyone in.