Sic transit gloria iPod

The iPod is done.

If you click the link on the store, it redirects you to the iPod touch – and only the iPod touch. Which, let’s face it, isn’t an iPod so much as an iPad nano, an iPhone without the phone bits. The 128GB version is $100 cheaper than the 128 GB iPad mini, so there you have it.

The iPod transformed digital music. Yes, there were MP3 players before the iPod, I owned a couple of them, and they kind of sucked. Too much money for not enough storage, spotty performance (I once had to return one because it was bricked by a poorly ripped version of Roy Orbison’s “You Got It”), all kind of weirdness around how to sync…and then…

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” The dismissive announcement from Slashdot is the stuff of legend for a reason, because the Creative Nomad Jukebox had a full-size hard drive for 20 GB of storage and was impossible to carry, never mind the “wireless” which was good for approximately nobody outside hardcore hobby enthusiasts and Slashdot gladiators. The iPod was 5 GB – “a thousand songs” – and would sync and charge over Firewire for optimal speed. It worked with iTunes, which Apple had produced from the code of SoundJam MP to create an app that would provide a unified interface for digital music – and now, instead of burning CDs from your stock of music, you could just dump everything to the iPod and be off with yourself.

It hit at about the worst time to be rolling out consumer goods – October 2001 – and I didn’t get one myself until my future wife gifted me one out of nowhere in May 2002. But it was transformative. All of a sudden I had all my music all the time, in a smaller package than any Walkman I’d ever owned, and instead of picking just the right fifteen songs for any given day to squeeze into some rebranded Diamond Rio, I had my entire digital music. Every MP3 I had acquired in the last three years now lived in the same space in my hand.

I went through several iPods in the ensuing five-plus years. I borrowed a gold iPod Mini from work at Apple, my favorite of all the ones I ever had. I had the use of a preproduction model for a while, which I obtained simply because it was roughly the same size as the forthcoming iPhone and I wanted to test the pocket-feel. I was gifted two iPod Shuffles and lost them both. I was working a trade show in Chicago on the day the iPod nano was announced, and our booth – showing off high-end layout and text and printing solutions – was inundated with people who wanted to see the new flash-based player.

And then the iPhone arrived.

In the ten years since it did, the only time I’ve ever used an iPod in any meaningful way was twofold: once in my old Rabbit, where the 2006 car stereo wasn’t ready for an iPhone and thus an iPod nano, occasionally updated, was the only digital music. And once with an iPod shuffle, bought to contain music for when I was done with the day’s podcasts and only needed to have some music in the meantime. It was a battery saving device for a time when I couldn’t count on being able to plug my phone in for any meaningful duration, and it’s still potentially useful for something like a seven hour flight in steerage when I need relaxing music or best-of podcasts but still need my phone at full charge when I land.

But nowadays the phone is your music provider – even more so in an age where everyone under 30 is steaming-first. And the backup to the phone, if you have Bluetooth headphones, is now the Apple Watch, with the potential to hold as much music as a Shuffle on your arm in case the phone goes before your watch and your cans do. Maybe not practical, but if you want to go for a marathon without your phone, you can.

Apple blew a hole in the universe with the iPod, and then blew another hole in the universe with the iPhone, and the iPod of necessity went down that second hole today. But the iPod proved Apple could be more than a computer company, and it was the iPod’s hole that the “computer” part of Apple Computer ultimately fell down. Nicely done, iPod.

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