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Received — 16 September 2026 ⏭

Backcountry’s fall hoodie sale has hundreds of sweatshirts and jackets at clearance prices

✇Popular Science
By: Stan Horaczek
14 September 2026 at 20:42

I stepped outside this morning into the Upstate New York air and it had a distinctly fall feel. Those warm summer mornings are over and hoodie weather is finally here. Right now, Backcountry has a massive hoodie sale happening right now with hundreds of hoodies and jackets up to 40 percent off. But, not all deals are created equal. I read the size run off all 110 product pages worth checking, and 79 hoodies still have four or more sizes in stock at the sale price. Every pick below names the colorway that carries the discount, because the color on sale is frequently not the color in the photo, and where a run has a hole in it I have flagged it.

Columbia Super Terminal Tackle Vent Hoodie $31.50 (was $70)

Four colorways at $31.50 and 18 color and size combinations in stock at that price, the most of any hoodie I checked

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The Columbia Super Terminal Tackle Vent Hoodie at $31.50 is meant for fishing (PFG stands for Pro Fishing Gear), but it’s a great all-around outdoor garment. Four colorways sit at that same $31.50, and Dark Stone Currents Fade covers XS through XXL with three to 12 units in every size. Columbia builds it as a fishing shirt, with mesh back and side panels for ventilation, Omni-Wick fabric and UPF 50 sun protection, so it works as a hot-weather shirt now and a light layer once the mornings turn.

GOREWEAR Fernflow Hooded Windbreaker (Women's) $45.50 (was $130)

The deepest discount in the sale that still has a full XS through XL run behind it

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The women’s GOREWEAR Fernflow Hooded Windbreaker at $45.50 is the deepest discount in this sale with a complete size run behind it. Tech Beige runs XS through XL with 28 to 50 units in every size. GOREWEAR made it for spring and fall trail rides, so the DWR-treated recycled nylon blocks wind and light rain, the hood is cut to fit under a helmet, and there are two zippered pockets plus reflective detailing. Lab Graphite and Black are $65 in the same XS through XL run if beige is not your color.

Dickies Heavyweight Full-Zip Hoodie (Women's) $22 (was $54.99)

Two colorways at $22 with 19 to 44 units per size, the cheapest clean size run in the sale

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No hoodie takes a beating quite like a Dickie’s and this is the classic style. Knit Black carries S through XL with 19 to 44 units per size, and Heather Gray is the same $22 with a lighter run. It’s a midweight cotton-blend fleece with a DWR finish, ribbed cuffs and hem, and a kangaroo pocket with a phone pocket hidden inside it. Sizing stops at XL in both colors.

Cotopaxi Capa Insulated Hooded Jacket (Men's) $112.50 (was $250)

PrimaLoft Gold insulation at 55 percent off, with S through XXL in the Dune colorway

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The men’s Cotopaxi Capa Insulated Hooded Jacket at $112.50 is the one puffy worth interrupting a hoodie list for. Dune is the colorway to click, with S through XXL in stock and nine to 20 units per size. Charcoal shows the same 45 percent tier at $137.50 but is down to one unit each in S and M. The Capa uses PrimaLoft Gold, which keeps insulating when it gets wet, under a recycled 100 percent nylon shell with a DWR coating and a scuba-style hood. That combination handles a damp 40-degree morning better than down at this price does.

Best hoodie deals for men under $50

The Columbia Terminal Tackle Pullover Hoodie at $22.50 is the cheapest men’s hoodie in this sale, and the catch is that L is gone, leaving S, M, XL and XXL at that price. The Columbia Wild Cast Sun Hoodie at $35 has a cleaner spread, with S through XXL in Bright Nectar and three more colorways in the $38.50 to $42 range. The GOREWEAR Everyday Tech Hoodie at $37.50 is the odd one here, since GOREWEAR labels its sizes in US and EU together, so the US medium reads as “US M/EU L” on the page.

Best hoodie deals for women under $50

The Dickies Heavyweight Logo Sleeve Pullover at $17.50 is the lowest price on any adult hoodie in the sale, with XS through M well stocked in Orange Glow and Coronet Blue, though L is down to a single unit. The North Face Evolution Sketch Logo Half Dome Graphic Hoodie at $29.25 is the pick if you want a name on the chest, with S through XL in White Dune and eight to 25 units per size. The North Face Chabot Hoodie at $48 has the widest run in this section, XS through XXL in the Space colorway.

Best fleece and midlayer hoodie deals from $51

The Outdoor Research Polartec 200 Hoodie at $69.47 is the standout, a Polartec 200 fleece with 15 to 49 units per size in Dark Navy Heather, while the other two colorways sit at 35 percent off. The North Face Terra Peak Hoodie at $120 is half off a $240 fleece with S through XXL in Smoked Pearl. The two Patagonia Uprisal hoodies, 95 Oval Logo and Trailcheck, are both $57 and run two to eight units per size, so they won’t last.

Best hooded jacket and shell deals from $54

Searching Backcountry for hoodies turns up a lot of rain shells and puffies, and this is where the deepest inventory in the whole sale lives. The men’s GOREWEAR Lupra GORE-TEX LE3 Hooded Jacket at $140 is a great pickup because all three colorways run S through XXL with 14 to 67 units in every size. The Columbia Tall Heights III Hooded Softshell Jacket at $54 is the cheap way into a hooded shell, S through XXL with 14 to 43 units per size. One caution on the Outdoor Research Coldfront Down Hooded Jacket: the 55 percent price belongs to the Storm colorway in size S only, so Navy at $139.48 is the one to click. The women’s Mammut Haldigrat HS Hooded Jacket is 65 percent off a $625 shell but skips L entirely.

Best hoodie deals for kids from $16

Only two kids’ hoodies cleared the size check, and both are North Face. The Evolution Box NSE Pullover Graphic Hoodie at $16.44 is 63 percent off, with M, L and XL well stocked in White Dune and S down to three units. The Canyonlands Full-Zip Hoodie at $44 is the better buy if you want it to last more than one growth spurt, since TNF Dark Grey Heather covers XS through XXL with six to 14 units in each size.

The hoodie deals with one size left

These are the listings that look best on the search page and worst once you open them, and they are worth knowing about because the discount is real even when the inventory is not. The men’s Marmot Novus LT Hoodie advertises 65 percent off, which applies to two items. The price with any spread behind it is $131.97, and XL and XXL are single units. The women’s Mammut Eiger Free Advanced HS Hooded Jacket shows 60 percent off on exactly one item, and its Black colorway at $337.50 skips L. The men’s Picture Organic Park Tech Hoodie at $68.21 and the Flylow Nash Sun Hoodie at $54.97 both have four sizes listed and one or two units in almost all of them. The women’s North Face Hydrenalite City Down Hooded Parka at $135 leaves XS, S, M and XXL, with nothing in between. And the men’s Patagonia Daily Hooded Sweatshirt sits in the 40 percent grid with one of its 32 variations actually marked down.

If you’re buying one thing, make it the women’s GOREWEAR Fernflow Hooded Windbreaker at $45.50, because 65 percent off with XS through XL all well stocked isn’t a combination this sale repeats. For a men’s pick, the Columbia Super Terminal Tackle Vent Hoodie at $31.50 covers XS through XXL in four colorways at the same price. And if the weather where you are is already arguing with you, the men’s GOREWEAR Lupra GORE-TEX LE3 Hooded Jacket at $140 is half off with S through XXL live in all three colorways.

The post Backcountry’s fall hoodie sale has hundreds of sweatshirts and jackets at clearance prices appeared first on Popular Science.

Apple sealed the iPod shut, and hackers have been prying it open ever since

✇Popular Science
By: Stan Horaczek
11 September 2026 at 14:36

I recently found my old iPod Video, and it still works. More importantly, it still has the version of Most Precious Blood’s “So Typical My Heart” with original vocalist Tom Sheehan singing. I’ve been toying with the idea of modding the iPod so it works with wireless headphones. I probably never will, but it’s fun to think about.

That itch has followed the iPod for its entire life. Apple built a sealed music player, and people spent the next two decades prying it open to see what else it could do. PopSci was right there with them with our ever-present willingness to void warranties.

An iPod attached to a DIY tube amp
The high-res images of this project are unfortunately gone the way of the 30-pin connector. Popular Science

The best example ran in the July 2011 issue. Vin Marshall built a tube-amp iPod dock that paired Apple’s music player with amplifier tech that peaked half a century earlier. In a tube amp, a small signal applied to the tube’s grid controls a much larger current, and that current drives the speaker. Marshall conceded that solid-state amps beat tubes on cost, size, and reliability, but that’s not the point. People still love tubes for their warm sound and orange-yellow glow, and his build leaned into both.

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All in, the project cost about $400. Marshall started with S-5 Electronics’ 16LS amplifier kit, added an off-the-shelf iPod dock, and mounted everything in an aluminum enclosure from Hammond Manufacturing. He didn’t have to design a circuit. Most of the labor went into drilling holes and mounting parts. The finished amp worked with a remote, and while it wasn’t especially loud, it had no trouble filling a living room.

Docking the iPod did more than hold it upright. Apple’s 30-pin connector, which arrived with the third-generation iPod in 2003, carried a line-level audio signal, so the amp got its music before it passed through the iPod’s tiny headphone amplifier. You don’t have to be a snobby audio purist to notice the difference in quality this path provided.

That connector didn’t have much time left. Apple replaced it with Lightning in September 2012, about 15 months after Marshall’s build went online, and a generation of 30-pin docks started its slow migration to thrift store shelves.

Marshall’s project has aged better than the connector. He posted his schematic, bill of materials, and assembly instructions on GitHub, and they’re still up. As of September 2026, TubeDepot still lists the 16LS kit at $349.95, which would eat most of Marshall’s original budget on its own.

The innards of the iPod amp
Images like this make me want to get my DIY on. Popular Science

Two years earlier, Laura Silver took a more musical route in New music from an old iPod. At an Eyebeam workshop in New York, she installed ipodLinux and pdPod, a port of the open-source audio language Pure Data, and turned an early iPod into a pocket drum kit. She found the iPod at a Lower East Side recycling center, learned the hard way that third-generation models needed FireWire instead of USB to power up, and later turned the empty case into a snack container. Remember FireWire? Good times.

The experts at that workshop told Silver the newer, slimmer iPods were nearly hackproof. That turned out to be half right. Hackers cracked the first iPod touch within about a month of its September 2007 launch, and jailbreaking grew into a hobby of its own.

Hard-drive iPods got bigger guts. By 2009, you could upgrade an old iPod to 240GB with a Toshiba drive that cost more than $300 by itself. Once the touch picked up cameras with the 2010 iPod lineup, retired models eventually found second lives as free home security cameras.

iPod taken apart
If you saw this view of your iPod, you were either having fun doing a DIY project or you were sad because you broke your iPod. Popular Science

Apple discontinued the iPod classic in 2014 and the iPod touch, its last iPod, in May 2022. The tinkering didn’t stop. Axios reported that eBay searches for the iPod classic rose 25 percent from January through October 2025 compared with the same stretch of 2024. Modders now replace spinning hard drives with microSD cards through iFlash adapters and install batteries with several times the original capacity. Rockbox, the open-source firmware that has run on iPods for about 20 years, reached version 4.0 in 2025.

That brings me back to my wireless headphones. Moonlit’s Classic Connect 2 kit adds Bluetooth 5.2 and USB-C charging to the fifth- and 5.5-generation iPod Video, and the core install doesn’t require soldering. The company estimates the whole job takes 10 minutes. That puts a lot of pressure on “I probably never will.”

The post Apple sealed the iPod shut, and hackers have been prying it open ever since appeared first on Popular Science.

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