Farewell, iPod. You will always spin the clickwheel in our hearts. Apple has officially killed off the once-beloved MP3 player; the U.S. Apple Store finally sold out of the last iPod Touch on May 12. It’s the end of an era, because the iPod was more than just a portable jukebox. It was a way of life. It revolutionized the art of music fandom. It created the shuffle-play future we’re all living in. The last non-streaming music gadget. The last one that didn’t require you to ask a corporation’s permission to listen to your own music collection. The last one designed for you to just be alone with the sound. The best damn listening device in the history of human ears.
The lonesome death of the iPod might seem long overdue. Just last week, Techradar ran a piece with the headline, “You probably didn’t realize, but Apple still sells iPods.”
But I’m a ride-or-die fan of the iPod Classic, which they stopped making in 2014, though it’s easy to find them refurbished online. My Folklovermore playlist has “Right Where You Left Me” on it six times, because in a perfect world, this song would be on every Taylor Swift album at least twice. So what if my Classic is technically obsolete? Trends change, rumors fly through new skies, but I never leave the house without an iPod. If Apple wants to take it away, they’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. (Which probably got so cold and dead from the clickwheel.)
People talk about this device in terms of how it started the digital-music era, or even how it paved the way for the smartphone. But in retrospect, now it looks like the last format designed for old-school pre-streaming trends, where music is something you “have,” rather than something you lease.
Listening to the iPod, you’re off the grid. You are not being tracked, measured, counted, rated, studied, data-mined, or researched. It’s nobody’s business, just you and the tunes. It keeps track of play counts, but that’s just for your personal stat-crunching amusement — it doesn’t judge you.
When the iPod arrived in 2001, it seemed too good to be true, promising “a thousand songs in your pocket.” Before that, if you took music on the go, you wore a Walkman, maybe packing a spare cassette or two. But an iPod blew those limits away. You could hike up and down a mountain listening to nothing but Velvet Underground live bootlegs. (My iPod has 9 hours of “Sister Ray” alone.) Or shuffle from New Orleans hip-hop to opera to soukous to dub. The iPod zapped all the boundaries of genre or era, creating a new breed of pop omnivore. It was a cross-cultural, cross-generational smash, a Sexy Sadie that came along to turn on everyone, opening minds to the raptures of the shuffle-play headspace. There was a 2006 book about the iPod with a totally right-on title: The Perfect Thing.
Most fans would say the iPod era really ended with the Classic — that’s the “Perfect Thing” version. The Touch had a wi-fi connection, but that just made it an inferior knock-off of a phone, and the beauty of the iPod was full immersion. You couldn’t check emails while listening, or watch TV. You couldn’t scroll what your faves did or said or wore today. Just their music. Hours and days and weeks of that glorious shit.
When Apple debuted these shiny gadgets in 2001, it seemed obvious that a song, even a digital one, was worth owning. (Or stealing.) You had Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella, ZShare, eMusic — so many ways to curate your own private MP3 stash. You could listen to your System of a Down tunes because they were yours. You didn’t get asked for a password. The only two-factor verification you needed was “I cry” and “When angels deserve to die.”
You can still snag other MP3 players, sure, but there’s something about this one. It created whole new kinds of fan devotion. The iPod boom went with the rise of emo, backpack rap, and other mass-romantic cult genres. For some reason, it made…
Read More: RIP, iPod: Apple Discontinues The Best Music Listening Device Ever