The end of the line

My very first iPod was the fourth-generation model. 20 large gigabytes of raw MP3 storage power. It retailed for $300, which is a hefty sum for a young high school kid who had to rely on his parents to make the purchase. Parents who weren’t rich to begin with, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had to wait until the fourth iteration to buy an iPod. I think I was still rocking a CD player before getting it; the cheaper alternatives simply would not suffice.

20 gigabytes was very well large enough to fit my entire MP3 collection back then. Almost all of it downloaded from infamous peer-to-peer sharing sites such as BearShare and Kazaa. Surely the statute of limitations have ran out on that sort of stuff, right? But what a revelation that was: my whole music library right in the palm of my hands. No more burning and swapping CDs. Music listening was never going to be same again.

Until my iPod got unceremoniously strong-armed robbed from me during junior year. Those days, the white-colored headphone cords - iconic to the iPod mystique - made any wearer an obvious target to thieves. Much like smartphone thefts of today, dudes would come up and snatch the iPod right out from your hands before you can even react.

I didn’t get another iPod until my freshman year of college. When I actually had my own money to spend yet another $300 on one. This time it was the 5th-generation normal size iPod that featured a color LCD and can play video. That thing got me through most of college, until I got my very first smartphone - an iPhone 4, Verizon edition - sometime during year four. The iPhone rendered the iPod redundant and obsolete, just like video did to the radio star.

So that was my experience with the most famous MP3 player of all time. Apple announced yesterday the last of the iPods - the iPod touch - has reached its end of life. The legendary lineage that revolutionized the music industry is no more. A hearty salute to a key piece of consumer tech history.

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Autumn nights by the Bay.

Retirement for the iPod

Today, Apple discontinued the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. If not officially, but certainly de-facto. Customers can no longer purchase the two varieties of the legendary music player on the Apple Store. The iPod Classic has long been put to pastures, and now the lone remainder of the lineage is the  “why are you buying this instead of an iPhone” iPod Touch.

The first-generation iPod Nano remains the most elegant and best designed iPod ever. I’m only sad that I never got to purchase it because at the time I had the full-monty fifth-generation iPod. That was a treasure as well. 

I’m actually surprised that Apple still sells iPods at all. The device has had a glorious run, but these days the smartphone does everything an iPod can and you get a phone for free. Even for someone like me who have thus far resisted the transition to streaming services and still have in silo over 150 gigabytes worth of songs, the contemporary iPhone comes with the requisite storage capacity to store all of it. It’s been years since I’ve had to carry an iPod to accompany the iPhone due to lack of capacity. Don’t lie; if you love music at all, you did that too. 

I love vinyl, and at the time compact discs with skippable tracks without waiting as you would a cassette tape was a revelation, but nothing expanded my love of music quite like the ability to access thousands of tracks on a device the size of a skinny deck of cards. There’s simply no replacement for convenience, which is why no one outside of headphone-amp huggers complain about the quality of an mp3 file anymore, and music streaming apps have take over. 

Long lived the iPod.