The iPod goes out not with a bang but a whimper and a shrug

Apple has (finally) discontinued the iPod. It should have been the end of an era, but it doesn't really feel like it, does it?

Hello? What the hell? My reaction to the iPod when it first came out was one of bewilderment mostly. This was, without exaggeration, the coolest innovation in music technology in my lifetime (even though it wasn’t the first of its kind, and probably not even the best). But it had the hype and all the drama. A groovy commitment to futurism. ‘Apple is a company that does mad things; Steve Jobs is a visionary’; all that stuff.

Some comic-book geek in a turtleneck telling you that you could hold a thousand songs in your hand at any time — what’s not to love? This felt like a revolution, maybe even a new world order. It always does feel like that though. When someone tells you they’re from the future, and this is what it looks like, it’s so mesmerising, so irresistible. You can’t help but buy into it. Technology is seductive not because it offers solutions but because it promises hope. A better tomorrow.

That’s what the iPod did. Back in 2001, computers were computers and everything else was everything else. These worlds were not expected to collide. In India especially. People who didn’t have a lot of friends had computers.

At the time, the process of music listening wasn’t quite as streamlined. It was a transition period with a mishmash of technologies fighting for space — tapes were still around, fading away from view somewhat but still offering great utility.  CDs, at five times the price, had begun replacing tapes as the primary (legal) source of discovery and listening. Vinyl was best left to the oldies. Illegal P2P downloads of songs in Mp3 files had become a legitimate thing. The computer software Winamp, with its drug-addled kaleidoscopic visualisations, was all the rage.

Technology is seductive not because it offers solutions but because it promises hope.

I remember starting off with this weird website called Audiogalaxy in the pre-Napster years. Then, briefly, the Napster era of global disinformation and fake news began, in all its horrible mislabelling glory — not one song was titled correctly, leading to some absurd experiences where you’d spend all day downloading one song and then it’d turn out to be a whole other, far shittier song. All sorts of random musics and viruses made their way on to my computer. Soon after the very public downfall of Napster, the clones and knockoffs came along — Kazaa, Limewire, off the top of my head, which even allowed download of videos on the rare chance your MTNL connection was hulking out — that, ironically, ended up having a far longer life than their spiritual precursor.

My old, withering Walkman and trusted Discman were still with me, but the iPod changed the game. The computer could now fit into my pocket. A digital chihuahua. All those Mp3 files I had accumulated over years of patient downloading from sketchy sources could now be wired to this tiny spaceship with a clickwheel and a tiny display. It and I were inseparable. I carried it with me everywhere for like the next 10 years. So many great revelations and epiphanies took place in its grand presence. I would sometimes forget my cell phone at home, but never the iPod.

This was a magical period of discovery, unrestricted by legalities or physical impositions. This was, ignoring the ethical conundrum that hadn’t quite hit me at that age, the internet and modern technology at its very best: offering limitless freedom to grow. It was liberating.

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The iPod is gone now. They’ve discontinued it. And it just feels a bit…meh. Oh the horror. A world without iPods! But honestly, it’s left me cold. For so many reasons. For starters, how — and why! — were they still making it? Didn’t they shut it like 10 years ago?

At its core, the iPod was a soulless conduit.

All the eulogies are pouring in. They’re earnest, enjoyable, heartfelt, peppered with the best and worst indulgences of nostalgia. But the one common factor, from the ones I’ve read, is that no one actually misses the iPod itself. What people miss is the memories they formed around the iPod. The discoveries they made. The trips they took. The battles they fought, sorting through file names and artist names or banging their heads against the wall at having wasted precious internet bandwidth on an incorrect song. Learning about themselves and who they want to become. Being moved by music. They miss the person they were 15 years ago. No one really misses the plastic and metal. Of course that’s how all nostalgia works, but it’s more stark with the iPod.

Because at its core, the iPod was a soulless conduit — nothing more, nothing less. And it hasn’t really gone away though, has it? Like: sure, the actual iPod may not be there. But phones now serve literally the exact same purpose. Except that they’re easier to use. It’s not like the technology has disappeared. It’s become incrementally more sophisticated.

And isn’t that what the iPod kept doing anyway? It existed in a state of impermanence. Faithful to the whimsies of modern technology, every version of the iPod would become obsolete in a couple of years. And then you’d either have to buy a new one or look on in envy. It was never finished. And Apple as a company — let’s not start that whole thing, but they exist mostly to suck consumers dry by constantly throwing new amendments at them and phasing out existing devices.

So it’s hard to form an actual attachment to the iPod itself. The Nano was this and the Mini was that and the Touch was this and the Shuffle was that. But really, the tenderness of emotion exists at all the stuff around the iPod. It’s not like your old VCR or your first copy of Catcher In The Rye or the Walkman or your favourite CD or your vinyl player. Those things, in the obtuse universe of nostalgic rumination, feel like they have some material value. They existed in and of themselves. They were replaced; they didn’t slowly morph into something else. The aesthetics, the experience, all etched in a time and place in history. The iPad, though, (to me) has a far more ephemeral quality to it.

It was great, and then everyone got a smartphone which did the exact same thing; it looked the same, it was built on the same technology, it sounded slightly better, you could play games on it, whatever. That’s the thing: the jump from tapes to CDs, or the one from CDs to MP3s, felt monumental. Those were genuine disruptions. So it was natural to feel a sense of loss when one replaced the other. But here, the shift has been inch-by-inch, model by model, incrementally developing into something slightly easier to use. Where’s the loss here? What exactly are we missing?

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