Two days ago, after learning that Apple’s last surviving iPod Touch had been forgotten, I looked at my 160GB iPod Classic Tomahawk and actually said aloud to it, “It’s just you and me, kid.”
It’s easy to see why Apple scrapped the status of the last iPod.company more or less Announce Its iconic dedicated music player is no longer needed, as its iPhone (and iPad and even Apple Watch) now cover the entire range of portable music players.
Well, Tim Cook’s behemoth may have called time on a product with a 21-year heritage in standard, nano, shuffle and mini camouflage, but my 15-year relationship with me is as strong and enduring as ever, thank you so much.
The iPod you see in the photo above has been around the world, going through countless auditions, job interviews, casting, rehearsals, and gigs.When in-flight movies don’t play, when Apple CarPlay doesn’t deliver rental cars as promised, when it’s time to learn German lyrics overnight, when everyone’s phone dies on the last train home, when it finally makes me understand Apple Music Hi-Res Lossless streaming on real Eat mobile data.
In 2007, I saved up for a bigger storage option because 40,000 songs seemed like an exciting number; it still is today – I’ve never managed to come close to filling it. Steve Jobs achieved his goal of delivering “1000 songs in your pocket” by 2001, but look at the scale of progress in just six years!
So why end a musical marriage now, 15 years later? After all, the file formats this iPod supports (AAC, AIFF, ALAC, and my dear old friend MP3, aka Lossy but Little) are still very important.
It’s almost impossible with my once beloved Sony MiniDisc player – although CD is still a viable, tangible music format, come on…I gave up trying to balance the Sony Discman in my bag , was stuffed into a water bottle many months ago in a futile attempt to avoid the cursed jumper.
That iPod you see above is still going strong: dented, scratched, overused, but still singing. Once, in a phone shop in Reeperbahn, Hamburg, Germany, I nearly cried, begging a man to fix a broken headphone jack.
“Es ist kaputt und ich kann die Musik niemals ersetzen!“I cried, even though I had prepared the phrase earlier (‘it’s broken, I’ll never be able to replace this music’). He shrugged. I came back the next day to find it fixed, and it was the equivalent of $60, Kurt Cobain can join me when I walk in to work again.
Of course, there’s no Bluetooth involved here, so forget about wireless earbuds, and no streaming over Wi-Fi, but the iPod shines in it. Are we heading for nostalgia?No, (though if you’re after that, you can relive the iPod’s glory days with this Spotify and Apple Music web player); the problem with the iPod is that you have to think music.
You have to plug it in physically, choose your sonic poison, and wait until all these albums plug themselves into your library, lighting up the 2.5-inch QVGA LCD display with their little stamp artwork.
But the real beauty is that once loaded, these files don’t go anywhere. Glorious albums line up in long, colorful letter rows ready to be devoured.Nirvana It doesn’t matter Not hindered by guest Wi-Fi networks, Alexa misunderstandings, Spotify Free playlists, ads, missing Bluetooth, app updates, incoming calls, Google notifications or important emails.
Your access to music is also rarely an issue with battery life – my iPod classic lasted comfortably 30-40 hours on a full charge.
The iPod and Lossy MP3 Files: A Musical Death or a Gospel?
The elephant in the room that the iPod focuses on has always been a tricky problem-solver. Is Apple killing sound quality with the iPod?While the Cupertino giant certainly doesn’t do anything about the details in your music collection (as it watches you gleefully load your player with lossy files), arguments are one of the accessibility.
You don’t have to wait hours or sacrifice a lot of storage to receive the album. You plug it into a friend’s computer, you eat from a variety of different iTunes libraries, you even (whisper) use a BitTorrent or other file mover once or twice – call it capricious youth . And don’t overdo it with egg pudding, but you can really do so much on a road trip.
Remember carrying a CD purse on public transport, with see-through sleeves separating your delicate discs? I do, those are my work tools. I ditched the boxes to lighten the load on my back as the CD without the box only weighs 16 grams – useful to know that.
Now, the leading edge of a note isn’t as direct, pleasant, or impactful in an MP3 file as it would be in 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality, but the iPod classic weighs 140 grams—about 8.75 CDs.With an iPod, you can carry one with you horrible so much more than that…
“Music has always been a part of Apple’s core, brought to hundreds of millions of users in the way the iPod did, and not only impacted the music industry — it also redefined how music is discovered, heard and shared,” said Greg, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing “The spirit of the iPod lives on today,” Joswiak added in a press release announcing the iPod’s demise.
I totally agree with point number one, Greg, but I have to tell you that my iPod actually doesn’t just exist in spirit. Yes, even teenage spirits.