Amnesia Lane: Killing the Walkman-killer

I wouldn’t be surprised if the most common reaction to Apple discontinuing the last surviving iPod model, the iPod Touch, was to say you didn’t even know it was still around.

The perhaps long-overdue retirement came today in a world that has little use for a product that once took the world by storm despite how horribly suited HDDs were to the use case of bouncing around in your pocket during read operations.

The iPod was many things. It was the third “i” hardware product in the era when Apple rediscovered the existence of marketing. It was Apple’s pivot to services, using the iPod to encourage you to load up on buying enough music (and later, videos and games) from the iTunes store to fill it. It was the product that changed Apple from a company that made millions to one that made billions. It was a series of prototypes that led to the App Store, iPhone and even the Apple Watch.

But to me, iPods and the similar devices that followed threw open the door on an idea previous portable cassette players could only flirt with due to their limitations: Giving life a soundtrack.

I was the unlikely buyer of an iPod (4th gen/click wheel, 20 GB) in 2004. Catching mononucleosis that fall meant I could still work my job babysitting computer labs, but did precious little else. Money coming in but not going out resulting in an inadvertent savings that topped $300 when all was said and done. As this was the age that being a college student was synonymous with having a metric ass ton of digital music files, so it was immediately obvious to me what a spare $300 could be put toward.

It wasn’t an investment to sneeze at, even so. I vividly recall one person I knew freaking out at how poorly protected my purchase was: “You spent $300 on an iPod. You need to buy a case to protect that.”

To which the only logical response was, “I spent $300 on an iPod. I have nothing left to buy a case to protect that.”

A case would nonetheless come in time. As would a couple crummy FM transmitters that were easily overpowered by everyone else’s FM transmitters. Having a car with no tape deck or auxiliary port was rough on the ancient iPod owner, for sure. These days you’d be hard-pressed to find a shitbox shitboxy enough to not have any options for getting your tunes on its stereo system so long as that stereo still existed. As much nostalgia as I have for my Age of iPod, I will never miss the experience of hearing the other car’s music for 5 seconds as I drove by it.

That iPod and I were inseparable. If you’re a fan of the old adage, “You should spend your money where you spend your time,” it bore out well here. That money easily breaks down into a cent per hour by the time it was done with me.

Though I must say that wearing the conspicuously white earbuds in those early years made me feel like a marked man. Occasionally, I would feel paranoid when a stranger saw the white cable and asked me how iPod life was. I got into the habit of saying I just bought the headphones so others would think I had an iPod, that I was cheating my way into a status symbol. It was a self-defeating lie; if the goal was to deceive others, why admit to it? Though it seemed like everyone bought it, or at least didn’t challenge it.

Still carrying around an active hard disk drive everywhere has consequences (not to mention driving it around VERY bumpy roads) and after a few years the iPod started having trouble accessing all of its storage. A few more years after that it would be dead entirely.

While the future would hold other devices that were far more capable, such as my smartphone that can bluetooth its tunes into my car, no future music player would carry anywhere close to the lifestyle impact as that first iPod. Life most certainly could still have a soundtrack. At any moment, I could pop in a pair of earbuds again and shuffle those songs while walking around the house or going about my business. I could have the tunes rolling while I sit in my otherwise empty office at work. But as much as I continue to love music, it would seem the soundtrack era of my life died with that iPod all those years ago.

So even to me, the news that the iPod is now just another piece of history comes with the dullest of shocks. Because long ago, it became something to build the iPhone over, and faded into the background as apps became the killer… app over having your music — and even photos and videos — at your fingertips.

But for a period of time, there was a device that was special for doing just one thing. And while that period lasted, it brought that specialness into my life in a way that just wouldn’t happen in the present. The iPod left today, but the world it belongs in left a long time ago.