It’s the end of the iPod era. The news that Apple is pulling the plug on the iPod Touch, and thus the entire 21-year-old line, is curiously timed for me because I only recently retired my iPod Classic. Every month for the past 30 years, I’ve made a compilation of my favourite songs. It’s a time capsule of musical memories.
For the first decade I used cassettes to make my compilations. This required a lot of creative editing, tense retakes and hovering over the pause button like a predator. After that, the simple drag-and-drop of an iTunes playlist felt miraculous. Even once Spotify arrived, I kept this up for years as an act of commitment: love a song, buy a song, own a song. But for boring technical reasons, the computer that housed my music could no longer handle the iTunes store, so I had to download songs on one device, transport them to another and individually add them to the library, a process which was almost as laborious as making a tape. Reprogrammed by touchscreens, my fingers found the iPod’s click wheel increasingly alien. Why was I still doing this? I didn’t know. So I stopped.
