I remember when we first met. My chubby sixteen year-old self walked by the shiny new Apple Store with my mother. We'd always go by it as we headed towards some godforsaken department store. It looked so welcoming, so clean, and so full of stuff I wanted—needed—desperately.
Those were the early days of mp3 players. I'd had a Rio (32mb, that's like, six songs), and I think a Sony. All of them either didn't have enough storage or crapped out within a few months. That day we walked by the Apple Store, the whole game changed. Somehow I convinced my mother to buy me the 10GB model. It was one of those rare moments where a sixteen year-old's wildest hopes coincide with his mother's will. I think she ultimately gave in because I had taken up exercise, and I insisted this would keep me on the healthy track. In the future, it would, so I was half truthing.
Back home, I ripped open the perfectly designed cube package. Its pieces unfolded to reveal the shiny brick of a player. It was clunky with sharp edges, heavy, and I had to buy a firewire card just to use it (this was far before USB 2.0). Those few obstacles aside, I soon had my entire music library in my pocket, just like Apple had promised. School bus rides were no thing, those four minutes between classes were now musical interludes, and using an array of accessories, I was able to hook it up to my Jeep's stereo. Since opening that cube, I have used an iPod every single day, without fail.
Number one died, as gadgets do, and was swiftly replaced by the fourth generation model with a gray click wheel. That one was left at my friend's ski house and I went in for a third time with the fifth generation, a sturdy piece of work that had a color screen. That fell in the toilet (don't ask) and was followed by four sixth generation iPods. The first died after being held together by rubber bands, the second was left on a Metro North train, the third died of overuse in urban environments, and finally we're left with the grandchild, the last of its kind, currently sitting beside me.
That's a lot iPods to go through over the years (and honestly, I'm probably forgetting a few), but I had grown attached to them. Older iPhones and iPod Touches just didn't cut it when it came to memory-size. Plus operating the click wheel is now practically second nature.
But the real reason I'm going to miss the O.G. iPod? There's something about a music-only device that made it much more intimate and personal than the swiss-army knife nature of a smartphone.
My friend Dave in college was an iPod evangelist like myself. He once asked our professor if she'd ever had "an iPod experience." She responded no, and he took it upon himself to illuminate her. He sat her down in her office, placed the thing in front of her and gave her the headphones. Having access to all of Dave's music, in the palm of her hand was an amazing, intimate experience. You can learn a lot about a person through their iPods.
It's my fondest memory of Dave and I only know it because that professor would later recount this story at his memorial service some months later. iPods are probably the last modern, physical presentation we'll have of music before everything goes full cloud. It's like sitting down with somebody's record collection, or pile of Cds—it has the same weird way of bringing people together.
It always struck a note with me, because I, like Dave, and now our professor, loved just numbing out with the iPod. And yes, you could technically do that with any other player, but that common hardware thread sort of brought this harmony to it—a kind of club we all knew about.
There's also a strange camaraderie amongst iPod users. A lot of people furrow a brow when they see a classic, as if you're hanging on to some kind of relic. But in reality, we're like a tribe, and it's one of those things you only appreciate if you speak the tribal lingo. That unspoken bond will bring strangers together on subways or light up connections on Twitter (a bunch of us have been commiserating, lately).
With Apple's discontinuation of my beloved hardware, I know that my days with it are numbered—my current piece will eventually follow the fate of its illustrious family members, and I'll be left with naught but an iPhone 6. That's hardly worth crying about, especially since there's probably enough storage for my whole library on there, but it does feel like the end of an era. After all, it was the iPod that changed the way many of us listened to music. Its invention took what was happening in the digital/desktop space and exploded it in the mobile space. And all those memories of high school, music in my Jeep, and Dave will be taken from my pocket and I guess, stored in the cloud? Because I guess that's where the future is, even the iPod inventor Tony Fadell says so.
Fare thee well, iPod classic, you were music to my ears.
