iApplaud the iPod's demise

Apple is quietly retiring the original iPod line after 13 years. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bought two iPods--I had my first one, a third-generation iPod Classic, engraved with a line from De La Soul Is Dead, "I got the bidox, let's do this like Brutus!," back when Apple allowed customers to have any kind of message engraved on the back of their iPods for a few extra bucks--and both those excellent rectangles died on me after only two or three years of use.

It's an excellent rectangle for those two or three years, and then afterwards, you're just bitter over how it's no longer excellent. I haven't bought another iPod since my second one, a black iPod Nano that replaced my dead third-generation iPod Classic, stopped working smoothly a few years ago. Even though I recharged its battery repeatedly, the Nano was starting to turn itself off in the middle of songs, just like how I chloroform myself whenever I hear an Iggy Azalea track coming on.

I spent so many hours filling each of those iPod hard drives with music and organizing the playlists that when those devices finally broke down, I felt like all those hours of curating were wasted. It made me wish walkmans didn't become obsolete because unlike iPods, an entire library of music wouldn't get wiped out along with the tape player when it would break down.

These days, I rely on just my MacBook to bump music. Apple needs to build portable music players that last longer than two or three years. The day when it does that is the day I cop another portable music player.