The iPod Classic at 15: all the good and bad of the MP3 player that changed how we listen to music…and paved the way for the iPhone 12 Pro.
There’s a bittersweet notion that makes the rounds on the internet every so often, which muses that at some point your parent picked you up and put you down for the last time. Well, that applies to tech, too: at some point, I turned off my iPod Classic for the last time and shoved it in a drawer, likely because I’d uploaded my music to my new iPhone 4 and have listened to music on my smartphone ever since. Truth be told, I haven’t thought of my iPod since, especially after Apple loaned me a new iPhone 12 Pro – but now I’ve been forced to reckon with a question: what does the iPhone 12 vs iPod Classic matchup look like? In moving home, I rediscovered my old iPod – my audio companion that blasted my tunes and podcasts on a thousand car rides and strolls between classes. I dusted off an old 30-pin rectangular charging cable, plugged it in to the wall, and in just over an hour, it was back. I tapped the click wheel and it turned on, giving me access to all the 2000s and early 2010s music I stuffed in the 80GB model. In the obvious sense, my iPod Classic is a time capsule, filled with albums from Weezer, The Postal Service, Modest Mouse, Mountain Goats, Passion Pit, Yeah Yeahs, Muse, and other luminaries that dominated that era of Indie Rock. It also held the more experimental (read: less white) corners of my taste I added piecemeal – Black Star, Ratatat, tUnE-yArDs, OutKast, ODB, Kid Cudi, Gipsy Kings, Gil Scott-Heron. It’s a comprehensive map of my musical exposure, and an unflinching look at the limits of my culturing. But more than just a cringey look at my musical taste, zipping through the iPod Classic is a reminder of how we used to consume music. It was Apple at the top of the music world, and the iPod was the perfect vehicle to deliver the streamlined iTunes experience on the go. It was also evidence of Apple believing so completely in content silos and its own permanent-purchase model that it slept on streaming services and had to fight to catch up. And yet, the iPod is so singularly good at what it does that I can still plug it in after nearly a decade and use it as if I’d put it down yesterday. Here’s what’s still incredible about taking an iPod Classic given to me in 2005 and firing it up today. In a world where smartphones have followed the iPhone’s lead into edge-to-edge displays and interaction possibilities are exponentially magnified through app software, the humble iPod Classic stands out for its simple interface. Use the scroll wheel to go up or down a list; click the center button to make selections to go deeper into nested menus, and click the top of the wheel to go back.
