The end of an era. Apple officially discontinues the iPod

On Tuesday, Apple announced that the era of the iPod is officially coming to an end. The iPod touch, the last remaining entrant in the iPod family of products, will be available “while supplies last.” The reality is that the era has really been behind us for several years, but it does tug at the heartstrings to know that the iPod is now purely a thing of history.

I still remember watching the event that Apple held to launch the original iPod from my dorm room in college in October 2001. It was Apple’s first event post-9/11. Even then it was clearly an iconic design, but not everyone was impressed. Famously over at Slashdot, which was at that time a huge tech product message board, one commenter famous said, “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” Of course the iPod would go on to be one of the biggest icons in pop culture history, and will certainly be the defining product of its era.

I first got my hands on one not long after they were released. I was working for my college’s IT department, and Apple gifted us a pair of iPods because we had made a large Mac purchase to outfit a computer lab. Because you could use an iPod as a portable hard drive, we actually used the iPods as part of the imaging process for getting those Macs set up.

For Christmas in 2002 my parents bought me a six-disc CD changer for my car. The next year they made that gift obsolete when they bought me my very first iPod: a third generation model that I still have to this day. In 2005 I started what would be a seven-year career in Apple Retail. At the time they had a program where they outfitted every employee with a fourth generation iPod that was loaded with product specs. The idea was that you could look up information for a customer right there with a customer from your iPod. Of course navigating through that data on the iPod’s black-and-white screen using the Click Wheel wasn’t very efficient, so this almost never got used. They discontinued the program the next year, but not before one lucky employee who had just started received one of the then-new fifth generation iPods that introduced a color screen and the ability to playback video.

In those early days of my time in Apple Retail, the iPod had already become such a huge phenomenon that teenage girls visiting the mall would say, “Ooh, let’s go in the iPod store.” When we got the first generation iPod nano models I remember standing at the front of the store, saying nothing, and just showing them to customers walking in to see the astonishment on their faces at how small it was.

In those days, it really seemed that the iPod would be around forever. Those commercials of dancing silhouettes holding iPods were ubiquitous (and ingenious). But everything has its day, and the iPod was a victim of the success of its sister product, the iPhone. No longer did you need a standalone music-playing device when that could just be an app on your iPhone.

I haven’t used an iPod in years, but it’s still a little sad to see the product officially come to its end. Leave a comment and let me know what your first iPod was. Finally, I leave you with one of my favorite iPod-related moments in TV history: