Memories of my iPod
Last week, after 20 years, Apple finally announced that it was discontinuing the iPod - the brand that arguably defined what it meant to be an .mp3 player in the early aughts, and what helped make Apple into the juggernaut that it is today.
My first iPod was the fifth-gen iPod Video. After begging my mom for one for a year or two to no avail (she thought that they were too expensive, and she wasn’t wrong), her younger brother/the cool uncle in our family decided that he wouldn’t stand by and let his two nephews carry CD binders around all day. So he purchased two - one for my older brother and myself - had them engraved, and shipped them internationally from India to us in Canada.
I had no idea what was in that small FedEx package, but I was excited. Opening it up, my 14 year old brain was absolutely melting. My very own iPod. It was sleek and sexy, and unlike any other piece of technology I had ever seen or owned up to that point. Everyone else was still using iPod Minis, but I, I had that iPod Video. I felt so cool, walking to school every morning, blasting The Used and Rise Against straight into my ear canals. I can’t tell you how many countless hours were spent loading up that 60 GB hard drive with all of the “legally” “purchased” music that I could get my hands on. Gone were the days of mixed CDs and hello click wheel.
While that iPod was the first “real” piece of technology I had ever owned, I arguably felt more attached the FedEx box that it came in, and that corrugated cardboard box was something that I held onto for years.
Fast forward to 2010, and my iPod was beginning to get a little long in the tooth. The battery would die after 4 hours, the click wheel was a bit mushy, and the screen was scratched to hell and had developed some nasty black lines. That’s when I upgraded to the 120 GB iPod Classic. Double the storage in a slimmer body, yes please.
Once again, that thing went everywhere with me. In one pocket was my iPod, and in the other was Motorola RAZR V3c (thank you 3 year phone contracts). Or, at least that’s what would’ve been the case had it not been stolen from me while I waited for the bus to take my to my part-time job at the Gap.
I was so relieved that I was entirely unharmed from that incident, but absolutely gutted that my most prized possession was gone. When it was finally returned to me, in what I think is the only time a petty thief was caught and the stolen item returned, all of my precious music was wiped, replaced with a 35 song playlist that I still have saved to this day. Thankfully, just a day before it was stolen, I had made a full backup, so restoring my iPod to its former glory was fairly easy.
That iPod lasted me another two-ish years, until a faulty power converter shorted it while on a trip to India. So, once again, I was out of a dedicated music player. My phone at the time, the HTC Desire, wasn’t the best for music playback, so my PSP 1000 was stuck pulling double duty as an .mp3 player until I could scrape enough money together to replace it with another 120 GB iPod Classic.
That’s the iPod that I used for many years, well into the twenty-tens, until phones became more capable and streaming became the norm. Eventually, that iPod found its way into a box of items in my parents’ basement, until a few months ago when I had the sudden urge to try and find it.
And let me tell you, the joy that I felt when I found it and saw that it still worked was unmatched. Scrolling through artists I had long forgotten about, looking at playlists that made no sense, and my absolutely insane way of grouping misc. artists and albums together made me so happy. It brought me right back to 2012, when I was at the tail end of my undergraduate degree and no clue in the world what I wanted to do next, except for staying up all night trying to find a viable download link to an album that didn’t contain a hidden virus.
I’m a fairly sentimental person, but I don’t have that same approach to technology. The iPod is different. It was a generation defining product. It’s what got me through my emo phase (emo’s back baby!), heartbreaks that weren’t, and insanely long bus rides to and from university. It’s what got me amped for TaeKwon-Do lessons in the back of my dad’s minivan and what I fell asleep listening to every night (a habit that I still have to this day, only now with podcasts). It’s an experience that no other .mp3 player can or ever will fully replicate. Not the Zune, and not the million other cheap plastic imitations.
R.I.P. to a real one.
