Apple has announced that they will no longer make the iPod Classic. They say they can no longer get the parts, although I suspect that the real reason is closer to "We can no longer get the parts at prices which make any sense due to lower demand in recent years."
The first iPod came out in 2001. Musical snob that I am, I scoffed at mp3 as a format, and the idea of paying hundreds of dollars for a device that could only hold 30GB of them. The original earbuds were a joke, and honestly, the ones made today really aren't much better. But they caught on. The masses were more concerned with convenience than quality, and if you needed more capacity, you could always pay more and get the 60GB version. Yeah, right. But people did.
Eventually I softened my stance towards mp3, when hard drives got larger and cheaper and mp3's at 256k or 320k ("near-CD quality") became more practical. I'm talking about my PC, though. If you have to go to 256k or 320k to get decent sound quality, an iPod made even less sense to me.
Meanwhile, I had high-speed Internet in my home, knowledge of and access to a couple of sources of full albums on high-quality mp3, and I kinda went nuts. I thought about the legal and moral implications (but please, let's not get into that here) but mostly figured that these are albums I never would have bought anyway, being perpetually broke due to having two kids and an unemployed spouse, so no one is losing anything. By the mid-2000's, I had hundreds of gigabytes of tunes on my hard drives.
iPods continued to get bigger and better, the 30GB and 60GB gave way to the 40GB and 80GB models, and in 2007 they announced the 160GB model. 160GB sounded like the first one that even had a chance of holding all my tunes. I was stuck in an "all or nothing" mindset, which I eventually overcame, but it seemed to me that I could take over 100 gig of tunes with me, and at some point I'd feel like listening to a particular album, or maybe I'd be showing off my amazing collection to somebody and they'd ask about a particular album, and that happened to be one sitting at home on the PC, but not on the iPod.
Then I apparently did something amazing at work and got a bonus. Not a huge one, $300. The other thing that happened that year was my mother-in-law died and left us some money, so I got a new car. The stereo had an "Aux In". I'd never seen that before (I was still driving my '96 Chevy). It was 1/8" stereo in, the headphone output from a portable CD or mp3 player. Great, amplify the crappy sound from your crappy portable player. I didn't think much about it because it also came with a six-CD changer in the dash, and I loaded that baby up.
But that $300 bonus and the fact that the 160GB iPod cost $299 could not have been a coincidence. The music gods were trying to tell me something, so I complied. I dove in. I joined the ranks of mp3-absorbing punks who listened to music in an inferior format through tiny 1/4" speakers with no hope of producing decent fidelity.
But we have The Apple Store in our mall, and it has two entire walls of accessories. I never opened my crappy earbuds, instead opting for some nice earphones with soft cushiony speakers and better frequency response than some home speakers. Also, I found the device that would change my life. It plugged into the 12v outlet in a car and hooked into the
bottom of the iPod. It thus provided power to the iPod and the 1/8" stereo output was line-level. If you raise the armrest in the center console of my car, there is an extra 12v power outlet, and an extra Aux In to the audio system. This little device was perfect. Plug it into the power, run the 1/8" stereo line to the Aux In, and feed iPod line out through the little slot which is obviously made for exactly this purpose, and plug the iPod into it. The iPod is powered, the sound is fed line-level into the car stereo, and everything is hidden under the console.
I've put over 125,000 miles on my 2007 Mercury, almost all of them while listening to my iPod. Family vacations, solo road trips to Michigan to jam with the guys, and of course countless hours commuting. The iPod has gotten me through it all. The prospect of a solid state iPod is enticing, but the 64GB max is a tough pill to swallow. Barely a third of my current capacity. But realistically, I've found that I never touch at least half of what's on there. It's cool having rock, jazz, classical, comedy, whatever I'm in the mood for, and the variety is great, but I suppose I could somehow live with only 64GB, if and when my current iPod finally dies. It's gotten just a bit glitchy in the past year or so, but it still soldiers on. I will miss it when it's gone.
A Tribute to the iPod Classic
Topic: The end of the iPod Classic (Read 4815 times)
