RIP iPOD

There isn’t another company on Earth quite like Apple.  How absurd is it that every time Steve Jobs steps on stage, news outlets from the New York Times to CNN cover the event live!  Imagine what Toyota, General Electric, or Sony would pay for that kind of press.  Of course, you could argue that Apple has been so innovative and ahead of the curve that they’ve earned that kind of adoration. In the mid-90s, when PCs were the only game in town, and Macs were a niche product for graphic designers and Mac cultists, Apple introduced the iMAC, the first computer in generations that made a change to a computer’s basic design. But while the iMAC’s were great products in terms of putting Apple back on the map in terms of being a relevant computer company again, it wasn’t until they introduced the iPOD in 2001 that Apple became the company they are today.

They’re commonplace now, but the time the only MP3 players available at the time were ridiculously expensive niche products that held 10 to 20 songs at a time, and manufactured by nondescript technology manufacturers like Rio. And then out of nowhere came the iPOD, which was so technologically advanced for its time it was like it dropped from the heavens.  I remember discussing it with friends and the whole thing seemed to be too absurd to be true. 5 GIGS of music? Who even owns 5 gigs of music? Keep in mind that most consumers were still using AOL-esque dial-up internet, when downloading even a 3 megabyte song was an exercise in futility. Of course iPODs became a massive hit, their various incarnations selling over 260 000 000 units worldwide.

So it was with great melancholy that the original iPOD is now all but dead. Last week, when unveiling Apple’s newest line of Apple products, the traditional Apple iPOD was all but forgotten, all but replaced with the iPOD touch. Even the iPOD Nano, the slimmer, less expensive version of the iPOD classic had abandoned its trademark click-wheel. The reality is that a mere 9 years after being introduced, the single-use device has become as obsolete as the portable CD players they replaced. Now playing music is just one of the functions of people’s iPHONEs, Blackberry’s, and various other personal devices.

In the mid-90s, Puff Daddy (back when he was still taken seriously) famously predicted that albums would last just 20 minutes. People at the time were wary, but the reality is that now thanks to the trends started by the iPOD, albums are now all but completely irrelevant. Scanning my own personal music collection, I see pretty much nothing but a collection of singles. Music is no longer a medium of albums, but short bursts of 3 to 4 minute melodies, ideally to be played in the background of a car commercial or soft-drink advert.

Of course we’ve already taken for granted the great many ways the iPOD has changed the manner in which we listen to music. Remember when you would want to listen to a song, but couldn’t because you didn’t have that particular CD on you? Or if you were one of those music-snobs who would bring his entire CD collection with him wherever he went in one of those suave nylon CD wallets? The iPOD alone has made the average road-trip about 5000 times more tolerable.

Two weeks ago I switched over from my Blackberry to an iPHONE, transferring my music collection along with it. My iPOD, my second, a 4^th generation iPOD classic with a cracked screen and scratches all over its paint, now sits on the bottom of a shelf, uncharged. In a few years, the iconic click-wheel design will be all but forgotten, replaced with touch screen interfaces and goodness knows what else. But I will always remember the iPOD era fondly. It was when we were liberated from CD skips, and the laughable limitation of listening to 12 songs at a time.