On Death and iPods ⇥ wired.com

Mat Honan, Wired:

Nobody had seen anything like it before. It had a 5GB hard drive packed into a device the size of a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t even know anyone was making hard drives that small. To get through all your songs, it had this wheel that let you click and click and clickckckckckckckckckckck your way through thousands and thousands of songs.

It cost $400. Out of my price range, by a long shot. (I was a junior editor at Macworld trying to pay rent in San Francisco.) But I saved and saved until I could afford one.

Suddenly, they were everywhere. White earbuds on the bus. White earbuds on the plane. White earbuds on every street I walked down, in every city in America. Sometimes you’d go to a party, and the host would leave the iPod hooked up to the speakers, so everyone could take turns DJing. Click the wheel and rock the party.

This day was bound to come eventually, but the quiet death of the Classic is a truly saddening moment. The iPod cemented Apple as the purveyor of cool, and you were immediately mad cooler if you owned one. I felt immediately cooler with my silver Mini, and then my ridiculously oversized (for the time) 60 GB Classic. A friend of mine owned a third-generation iPod — the one with the wheel and the four touch-sensitive buttons across the middle, below the screen. I had friends with Nanos when they were first released, and other friends with Shuffles. Even if you didn’t own an iPod by 2006 or so, you could quickly name ten people you knew with one. And the ads have become totally iconic.

I’ve long harboured a suspicion that the iPod Classic would be discontinued as soon as the iPod Touch got 128 GB of storage, though, and I think this is the year that happens.

Every product line has a lifespan, though. The iPod’s was long — 13 years — and it’s still going. Just not with the one that started it all.