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.