I’ve never owned an iPod. I received an iPod nano as a Christmas present years ago, and I have a lot of iPod shuffles, but I’ve never ever used them. This means I never owned them, right?
I’ve never been the type to listen to music on the go. My preference is listening to live music, where I need to sit through an hour or two, then I leave. I don’t even have a single song on my mobile phones.
I lived through the Sony Walkman age, and I owned one or two but, again, I never used them.
However, when my 20-year-old daughter told me last week that Apple had effectively killed the nano and shuffle, I understood her pain. She received her first nano (a fifth-generation release) from my brother, who then lived in the US. My mother had spent the summer with his family, and she said that she’d make sure my daughter would get the nano at the end of her stay.
My mother was successful, and my daughter was extrahappy because the nano, ordered online, had her name engraved at the back. This was a service that Apple offered if you ordered your unit online.
Anyway, back to the topic. By dead, I mean the iPod is no longer included in Apple’s menu. You can’t buy it or any accessories associated with it. Simply speaking, it’s been discontinued.
“Today, we are simplifying our iPod lineup with two models of iPod Touch, now with double the capacity, starting at just $199, and we are discontinuing the iPod shuffle and iPod nano,” the company said in the statement issued on July 27.
In place of the iPods, there are two versions of the iPod Touch—which runs on Apple iOS and is similar to an iPhone, only without wireless-phone capabilities.
The iPods you own are still running (unless they’re broken), if you can charge them. My daughter still has a charger for her shuffle but none for her nanos, so this is really goodbye.
For those in their 20s, the iPod was more than a means to store and listen to music. It represented memories. So Apple’s recent move signaled the end of an era.
“Yet, at the end of the day, I’ll miss the shuffle. Perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia. But also because its physical buttons were the last relic of a more tangible era of mobile devices,” Chaim Gartenberg on www.theverge.com wrote.
In 2005 the iPod nano was to Apple what the lipstick was to Chanel. If you can’t afford the bag, you can get the lipstick.
What killed much of the iPod family? I’m not an expert, but I’m inclined to think it was music-streaming services that did it. Spotify gives music lovers access to millions of songs for a minimal fee. A song on iTunes is less than a dollar. An iPod is just extra weight in your bag. Why store music in your iPod when you can stream it on your mobile phone?
Nobody owns CDs anymore. Very few people I know purchase songs on iTunes. Why buy Ed Sheeran’s new album when he’ll be in Manila for a concert anyway, and it’s so easy to listen to his songs on Spotify? Every singer, every band seems so accessible now that owning an iPod/CD seems, well, old-fashioned.
I’m going to say this from the point of view of a writer who has lived through the era of typewriters—technology has made life more convenient for us, but its very nature is ever-changing. What is cutting edge right now is tomorrow’s discontinued product.
So what gadget is next? The iPad?