Bye-Pod
Now Classic MP3 Player Sidelined
by Paul Grimsley
And so, apparently all signs point to the death of the i-pod. This must be a strange moment for some in the music industry, given that the device pretty much revolutionized the way that we listen to music. It spawned imitations, and even though it wasn’t the first MP3 player, it was the MP3 player that really led the way.
Perhaps it is going to join all those other devices, no longer prevalent in the culture, as a fetishized thing that was well designed and reliable, and filled with more than a little bit of Steve Jobs magic. Maybe Baby Driver is the start of the worship; meaning the kind of worship with a nostalgic bent, because people have loved their i-pods for years.
I am going to say that I think i-pads were useful and interesting, but they in no way had a comparable cultural impact when put up against the i-pod. The potential it came with — to carry your whole music collection in your pocket, was pretty amazing. Part of that is probably down to i-tunes as well.
So what will replace it? Well, in order for Apple to phase it out you know it’s already been pretty much replaced — most people are using their phones these days. Or maybe their portable speakers. Or maybe, like me, a lot of people are returning to analogue formats — I personally have been repurchasing a lot of my CD collection, usually with an Amazon Cloud component, and others are really getting into vinyl. And it isn’t just older consumers buying vinyl — this is the millennials, the hipsters.
The shift from product to service with a lot of companies, designed to put you in a cycle of perpetual purchase, or upgrade, and never owning a tangible product can be problematic for some. But maybe not for Apple consumers — the i-phone doesn’t suffer because of its price, nor do the other machines they put out. And maybe I am banging on a drum I shouldn’t be, but haven’t the leaps forward on the hardware plateaued in recent years? Scaling up or down does not a revolution make.
I like my i-pad, but I have not really been as excited about any other machines since the candy-colored i-books back in the day. Cook is trusty over innovative — and maybe moving forward with the security issues the world seems to be facing, this is going to be increasingly valuable. I like the guy. Apple are still more reliable than Microsoft — but they aren’t really as exciting as they used to be. Are they? If I’m wrong please point me in the direction I need to go; I am willing to be proved wrong. I am not sure that their office space really counts in this argument either.
I want to feel the rush I feel when I watch Halt & Catch Fire; something dragged back into the now from over the bleeding edge and into the future. Is Elon Musk the only place to get a hit of that now? Where is the fire in the belly desire for something new in the home computing market going to come from? Laptop tablet combinations aren’t as exciting as they think they are.
Some days I look at the slow existential creep that rises off of the unchanging exteriors of the same old same old machines, and I wonder if the future arrested, and we slid into atemporality — an endless morass of now with no distinguishing features to keep me interested in the landscape? It’s not like the software updates are bowling me over with their innovation either — it seems they more often sneak in and steal functionality rather than add anything.
But what was I talking about? Oh, yes, the i-pod — what does this signal? Is all music listening done digitally going to run through phones now? Phones, which are used less and less for talking on, and more and more for texting, browsing, watching, navigating, and listening to music. I often get frustrated if someone calls me on the thing. Phablets, are an ugly interstitial notion as we transition into something gathering itself together just over the event horizon. I know Nintendo-thumbed freaks who have wrestled books into being on their phones, but I think they’re stuck in the rut of the familiar rather than representing any real kind of demographic.
It is a strange place for tech at the moment. I feel like watching Amazon is more fruitful than Apple — their range of Alexa items may be pointing to the early emergence of an interactive soft AI command hub in the house that deals with all of the in-home media needs (and everything else now they own Whole Foods), and maybe the Amazon Tap is what we need for being on the move. Wearables haven’t quite swam upstream into the mainstream yet; they’re kind of in that nebulous realm with VR where promise isn’t quite delivered by the available tech. I am hoping to be bowled off my feet — maybe a portable quantum computer that is in geo-synchronous orbit with me that can understand my accent and project any audio or video I want. It may be a way off, or it may be some siloed not yet unpacked potentiality hidden on a piece of existing tech; whatever it is it has to be more interesting than where we are at; it has to be a comparable thing to the i-pod. Steve Jobs understood one thing — we need a little magic in our lives.
