The death of the iPod

While many Apple fans were getting goosebumps over the unveiling of the upcoming iWatch (Oh, great: a watch to replace the phone that replaced my watch), a smaller news item seemed to have been buried in the back pages last week: the demise of our beloved iPod.

Yes, rumor has it that Steve Jobs’ perfect device, the one that changed so many games for Apple that he was once again hailed as a guru and a genius, is being phased out.

If you think I’m kidding, try tracking down a new, boxed iPod in Metro Manila these days. Most stores will say they’re just “out of stock,” but that just means they didn’t get the memo: they’re not coming back. Hasta la vista, baby.

While this is not official, all the online tech dweebie signs point to it: the iPod has disappeared from the Apple.com website; it’s not been upgraded in six years; and Apple CEO Steve Cook has lamented that it “doesn’t sell” too many of them. Signs that the axe is about to fall.

A lot of people I pointed this out to were not much troubled. See, they’d already moved on to iPhones and iPod Touches and other devices to store a fraction of their MP3 music. The iPod — its simple design, virtually unchanged since 2001; the game-changing wheel and lack of buttons and other doo-hickeys; plus the Jobs promise, “to carry a thousand songs in your pocket” — seems like a relic to Apple fans who have leapt over its corpse in the gleeful pursuit of every new gadget and iteration in the past decade or so.

But for those who insist on carrying around most of their music library, the iPod was a must. From its humble 5GB original capacity, the latest version held a whopping 160GB. You could hold about 50,000 songs in your iPod, if you used a shoehorn to fit it all in.

Who needs that kind of music library? A lot of us. Maybe not 50,000, but certainly into five figures. We needed it because we understood the Jobs dream: that there is something sublime about bonding with your music, anywhere, in the middle of any experience. Music is not just background noise while you troll Facebook; it’s not meant to accompany previews on Star Movies or to disrupt your day in jagged little bursts from your cell phone ring tones. It’s music. We experience it the way we do literature: we crave its entirety. From first page to last. From beginning to end. 

And that’s the promise that the iPod held.

And that’s what Apple is taking away from us.

Why would Apple do this?

There’s no official explanation. But here’s an obvious one. The thing was too perfect. People did not need to update their iPods the way they were compelled to do with new versions of the iPhone every 18 months. iPods kept going, year after year. You could keep adding songs, deleting some. Sure, the things eventually conked out, or became bricks if used too strenuously. The batteries wore out. But the simplicity and durability of the design was an industry standard. Too perfect, you could say. Not enough profit in selling iPods.

The advent of the iPhone was another game changer for Apple: suddenly, it wasn’t about introducing a brand new device every year to blow people’s minds; it was about getting people to upgrade their old ones. After iPhone changed the cell phone industry, it became a game of catch-up, with rivals seeking to cut into Apple’s yearly astronomical profits (hello, Samsung!). Jobs had one more great gadget, the iPad, but even that one faces extinction because — you guessed it — they don’t wear out quickly enough. Apple reported iPhone sales remained brisk in 2014, but iPad sales were flat. That’s because, like the iPod, people don’t need to replace iPads very often. So, like Hollywood banking on sequel after sequel, Apple decided to shift its chips over to things that keep customers coming back. And the art house movies can go hang.

Oh, I know what some will say. The iPod was replaced by the iTouch and the Nano. Nifty little devices. The iPod Touch is all one finds in most Mac stores nowadays, stacked on the shelf where the iPods used to be. They’re lovely, a knockoff cousin of the iPhone, without the ability to phone, of course. Their capacity is about 64 GB, max.

That’s not enough.

Someday, Apple may pull a Coca-Cola, and bring back the iPod. That’s what Coke did after its “New Coke” was a universal flop: they reached into the safe and pulled out the “Classic Coke” formula, the one they said would never be used again. Because people were pissed about the New Coke, and didn’t want to drink it. They brought it back, like Veronica Mars and Arrested Development (mixed blessings, but you get the idea). Maybe Apple will come to its senses, and honor the vision of Steve Jobs, to whom music was so important, he kept 37 different versions of Bob Dylan’s One Too Many Mornings on his iPod.

In the meantime, we who still love our iPods will continue to spin that wheel and dial up our precious sounds, grim in the knowledge that someday the little monolith is going to ossify into an unresponsive brick. Then it really will be “the day the music died.”