Age is a blessing — but it surely’s additionally fucking terrifying. Particularly once I realized it had been 20 years for the reason that iPod was launched.
As soon as I ended hyperventilating, I understood this was okay. Why? As a result of the iPod modified my life. And, to this very day, I imagine it’s the best gadget ever created.
It didn’t start that manner although. Earlier than I received my arms on an iPod, I believed MP3 gamers had been silly.
The yr is 2005. I’m about 16 and I’ve been constructing a CD assortment for a number of years (one I really nonetheless have, shout out the Marantz CD6007).
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I’d given up on moveable CD gamers a number of years beforehand, primarily as a result of they skipped on a regular basis and had been too huge to hold round — particularly as I did guide labor on the weekends.
So, round 2001, I saved as much as get myself a teeny-weeny Panasonic MP3 participant.
It was a terrific machine — and forward of its time — however there was a severe challenge: storage. It performed music off an SD card and the one which got here with it was solely 64MB.
In actual phrases, this meant I might get simply over an album’s price of songs on it. Not ultimate for somebody with cabinets buckling underneath the burden of CDs.
Proper now, I can hear you saying “JUST BUY A BIGGER SD CARD, CALLUM!”
And I attempted, I actually did. However SD playing cards had been fucking extortionate again within the early 2000s, particularly for somebody with solely a Saturday job. It’s onerous to seek out precise figures, but it surely was widespread for an SD card to price round $3 per megabyte in 2001.
Meaning a 128MB SD card set you again roughly $384. Quite a lot of money for not a lot music.
So I did the one logical factor and switched to the way forward for music know-how: minidisc.
As ridiculous as that sounds, there was a specific amount of sense to my determination. A single minidisc price round $3, might be full of 320 minutes of music, and you may switch music from a pc to it.
For a number of years, my backpack jangled with sound of a minidisc library.
It was at this stage in my life that I first noticed an iPod. It regarded pointless. What profit might I, a minidisc prince, take from an MP3 participant like that?
In fact, this modified once I really received my arms on one. It’s a second I’ll always remember…
I used to be on vacation in Spain with my household. My sister had simply received an iPod for her birthday — and I couldn’t care much less. My minidisc obsession was in full swing and I’d already tried this entire “digital music malarky.”
The longer term, I knew, was all bodily.
After a number of days of being across the iPod although, I received curious. I ought to have an understanding of why this dumb white field isn’t for folks severe about their music, proper?
So, I sat on the chilly stone ground of the house, plugged my headphones in, and my life modified.
This machine — which was about the identical dimension as my Minidisc participant — overflowed with music. Utilizing it was so… elegant. Slightly than the array of bizarre buttons and small screens on virtually each different music machine I’d come throughout, the iPod regarded superb.
And thus started my love affair with the {hardware}. The iPod Picture got here out that yr and I by no means regarded again.
The outsized function the iPod performed in my life is advanced and nuanced.
On the flip of the millennium, I turned fully obsessive about music. I consumed documentaries, books, magazines, or no matter I might get my arms on, actually — and spent each single penny I had on CDs.
After I received an iPod, for the primary time in my life I had full entry to all my music, regardless of the place I used to be.
It was not solely a conduit for me falling in love with artists, it was a machine that was by my aspect for among the most tumultuous years of my life. Regardless of my psychological well being struggles, music — and my iPod — had been all the time there.
The machine was greater than a instrument, it was a companion.
In fact, there’s an argument to be made that that is unrelated to the iPod itself. However I attempted out a number of totally different MP3 gamers and, to me, none had the iPod’s magic.
Whether or not it was its stylishness, the ingenuity of the clickwheel, or the pure readability of the interface, no different machine might contact it, not to mention be as magnificent as Apple’s MP3 participant.
Technically, I do know it’s only a bundle of wires and steel, however the iPod was a lot greater than that. It was a lifeline, a supply of pleasure, and even twenty years since its launch, I nonetheless miss that magic little rectangle.
