Charlotte Latvala: iPod goes the way of the wooly mammoth
“Farewell to the iPod.”
My first reaction, when I sleepily read that headline (ironically, on my iPhone) was: “Oh no — what will we get the kids for Christmas?”
Then I realized it wasn’t 2006 and I haven’t made a frantic late-night run to the drugstore in search of iTunes gift cards in years.
There was a time in our house when you couldn’t go 20 feet without running into a child connected to an iPod. The Mini. The Nano. The Shuffle.
I was once gifted a used iPod Shuffle.
“Mom, you can put all your music on there! It can hold 1,000 songs! It will change your life!”
It did not change my life, for several reasons.
1. I don’t like my music “shuffled.”
2. I don’t like objects in my ears.
3. I was already middle-aged and set in my ways and “you-kids-call-this-music?” cranky.
4. What was “downloading”?
5. And yeah, the ears. That was a complete deal-breaker. I never even adapted to the Sony Walkman, so I couldn’t exactly get behind a bean-shaped object shoved dangerously close to my ear canal. Nope.
Anyway. Apparently, the advent of the iPhone was the beginning of the end for the iPod. They’ve dwindled like the wooly mammoth population after the Ice Age. And now Apple has stopped making them altogether.
But I do have fond memories of our iPod years — and not just finding them in the junk drawer and thinking “I wonder if these are worth anything?”
One of my children dressed up as an iPod for Halloween. Another performed a theater-camp skit as an “iPerson.” For a while, iPods were as ubiquitous as SpongeBob, and, um, iCarly, in our family zeitgeist.
And now, the iPod has gone the way of the 8-track player before it. It’s as relevant as margarine in 2022.
It is expired, done, extinguished. Canceled, as it were.
Why do I care? Maybe because it’s a milestone of sorts. A complete trend has come and gone without me. I’m still not completely sure what an MP3 player is, and how it differs from an iPod (And no, I don’t want to know. I’m happy living in my alternate universe, where “records” have an A-side and a B-side and music mysteriously floats over radio waves before it bounces across your eardrum.)
But I appreciate the sentiment of children wanting to get their parents up to speed on the latest…whatever. (I hearken back to my frustration in trying to explain the plot of “Tommy” to my mom when the movie came out in 1975.)
I suspect my older kids, who are part of a generation already nostalgic for Dance Dance Revolution, Heelys and GoGurt, will feel a twinge of sadness for the passing of the iPod.
Not to worry. I’m sure in another few years the mania for vintage iPods will emerge. And I just may have a pink iPod Shuffle that’s worth something sitting in a junk drawer.
Charlotte is a columnist for The Times. You can reach her at charlottelatvala@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Latvala: iPod goes the way of the wooly mammoth
