Saturday, September 13, 2014

R.I.P iPod

Wired are reporting Apple have killed off the iPod. It had been on the fall every since the iPhone had been introduced. Oddly phones back then could play mp3, I remember my Nokia could, the problem was it was clunky, the Apple iPod was a thing of beauty, Jonny Ives industrial design. It did only one job playing music, but it did that very well.

A decade ago, I bought my first iPod, a 3rd generation, before they came up with the click wheel. I felt so excited getting it out of the box. Apple were far more generous back then, my 20GB iPod came complete with a dock, a combined USB and Firewire cable for super quick transfer of files.

In those days Apple were on the resurgence, they were cool but not popular in the way they are today. They were not the first company to have an MP3 player, but the iPod was simply better than the other players out there. I remember Bruce had bought a Creative DAP jukebox. It held a lot of music but it was large, clunky and took forever to load music thanks to the slow usb 1 interface. I steadfastly hung on to my sony mini disk player, which while it had better sound quality thanks to the Sony ATRACK compression only held an hour worth of music.

Buying an iPod considered with my second trip to Australia, I remember sitting on the flight playing what track is this with Danny, and listening to music in Paul's apartment in Kings Cross Sydney. I am sad to see iPod disappear, even if I didn't own one for years it  is linked to some special memories for me.