Goodbye To The iPod Era
Apple discontinuing production of the iPod really does mark the end of an era, and the end of the era of the MP3 player, which was a great gadget.
I got my first MP3 player – a Rio Chiba – in 2003 as a birthday present. It was pretty great. You had to use the Rio software to load the MP3 files in the order you wanted, so basically the music played like one giant playlist. Before this, I would bring a CD player, some headphones, and a stack of CDs with me when I went to write anywhere. (And some spare AA batteries, too – that CD player ate up batteries like, well, me eating fries.) Of course, this was long before you could buy MP3 files easily, so I spent a lot of time with Windows Media Player ripping CDs.
After that, I got a Sansa View player when it came out in 2007. That was a pretty great little device. I avoided getting an iPod for most of the 2000s because I didn’t like the thought of a small portable device with a mechanical hard drive – it would only take one solid mechanical shock to break the hard drive, as many people found out with the Click of Death.
But when 2009 rolled around, I started running regularly, and I needed something more robust. So I got my first iPod Touch and started using iTunes to manage my music library, and I haven’t looked back since.
In the thirteen years since, I’m now on my 3rd iPod Touch, and they’ve improved with each iteration. In fact, I’m listening to the soundtrack of BATTLE BROTHERS on my iPod Touch as I type this post, and I took it with me when I went running this morning.
A few people have tried to dethrone the iPod – Microsoft spent a lot of money on the Zune, SanDisk tried with the Sansa line, and Creative cranked out a bunch of MP3 players for a while – but the iPod outlasted them all. In fact, what finally defeated the iPod was its own obsolescence as the concept of an MP3 player was absorbed into the smartphone.
I will miss the era of the dedicated MP3 player. I don’t trust streaming services because if the Internet goes down or there’s some squabble over a licensing contract, the content can disappear in the blink of an eye. If I like something, I’ll get it in MP3 and add it to my library, which I’ve been building up since 2003 and now holds 37 gigabytes of music. Like, I’ve been playing ELDER SCROLLS BLADES recently on the Switch (with a point of pride that I haven’t paid for a single microtransaction) and I liked the soundtrack enough that I bought it and added it to my MP3 file hoard. Though, of course, I can just copy my music library over to my phone.
I suppose this shows how quickly the New & Cool can become a historical relic. I can remember when everyone thought that iPods were just the coolest thing ever. Yet to a child who’s two years old as of this writing in 2022, when he’s old enough to understand the concept, an iPod will be little different to him than a TV vacuum tube or a phonograph, a relic of a bygone age that he might have to memorize for a class about the History of Computing or something. I can just imagine the multiple choice question – “In what year did Apple introduce the iPod, one of the forerunners of the smartphone revolution?”
Still, Apple does like money and people like nostalgia, so maybe in a few years they’ll put out an iPod Classic. Like, the best iPod clickwheel design, but with Bluetooth and 512 gigabytes of flash storage or something.
I’d buy one. 🙂
-JM