The iPod was an inbetweener device in the end – it won’t be the last

The iPod has gone to entertainment device heaven and few will mourn it, not because it wasn’t once loved but because most people thought it was already dead.

Tech collectors, parents who rated it as a pre-phone option for kids and indeed anyone drawn to the idea of an iPhone without an actual phone service – wait, that sounds amazing – have been busy exhausting the last of the stocks.

But in effect the iPod touch, the last remaining model, has been sunsetted, discontinued, killed off in favour of more expensive products. Apple has no mercy like that.

Its announcement has inevitably sparked a cursory wave of reminiscence for the iPod’s original arrival on the scene while the internet was still firmly in its “what’s all this about?” period; an awkward interim phase of dial-up frustrations, buffering videos and, worst of all, blogging. We now call this Web 1.0 and it is frankly no wonder the music industry missed its potential.

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With the perspective of 20-plus years – the iPod was introduced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in October 2001 – it is striking just how limited Tony Fadell's invention seems.

Like the Dansette record player and Sony Walkman before it, this was the latest pinnacle of portability, yes, but its advantages were all presented in old-century language. A sterile-looking device "the size of a deck of cards", as Jobs put it, the first iPod could store 1,000 songs, with this number offered up as infinite in the context of most people's music collections; Jobs, like iTunes, used the word "library".

I was shown an iPod in early 2002 and just remember being confused. I easily owned more than 1,000 songs, if album track skip-button specials and CD single B-side afterthoughts were included, but when would I ever need them all with me? Mostly I listened to Destiny by Zero 7 on repeat anyway.

The first iPods had no direct internet connectivity. Music files were transferred to it via a cable from your computer. Incredible, isn’t it? Today, if a house party host played music off their laptop version of iTunes, it would seem quaint. In 2002, it was the stuff of early adopters.

This was a time when having and building a music collection was a mainstream pursuit, a time when “the size of a deck of cards” must have sounded like a brilliant analogy. It was a time when the Apple product launch event hype had yet to be fine-tuned.

Eventual successor

But although the iPod played no small part in hurrying the collapse of physical music sales that was underway at this point, it turned out to be an inbetweener technology – one good decade (at best) and one for luck. This Noughties emblem bridged a gap between the 1990s roster of the CD Walkman, Sony MiniDisc and first MP3 players to its own eventual successor, the iPhone.

Jobs’s most revolutionary device incorporated the iPod’s functions, obliterating the need to carry a second deck of cards. The entire practice of purchasing and downloading songs from iTunes was next to go, faltering at the advent of audio streaming subscriptions. Ownership of music is now a niche activity. It is a novelty toasted by promotions such as Record Store Day, not a buying habit inculcated in childhood and ingrained with the aid of teenage pay packets.

I could wax nostalgic (again) about what music culture has lost and hail what it has gained as a result, but it is that 20-year timespan for the now defunct iPod, with less than half of that in the sun, that seems more relevant here.

What is the early 2020s equivalent of the iPod? Which of our current enthusiasms will seem especially humdrum in 2042 – not a false dawn, exactly, but a gateway to a more comprehensive shift? What are we getting excited about now that Generation Alpha will treat with native complacency?

There are obvious guesses. Every form of screen technology seems rife for evolution, for starters, though we always say that. Whether the change is meaningful is a whole other matter. The smart home is trapped in a stop-start limbo in which the long-promised prospect of the self-ordering connected fridge is yet to make its debut in your best friend’s kitchen. Wearable tech, too, is clearly only warming up.

A minority of people use an Apple Watch as a de facto iPhone, at least occasionally, but it seems more likely that the Watch functions will become available through the forthcoming Apple Glasses (not the official name) and the Watch, rather than replacing the iPhone, will itself be superseded.

For sure, the merger between our offline and online environments through augmented and virtual reality apps is likely still in its infancy, both in and out of the home, and is poised to redefine our conceptions of media once again.

Apple investments

Meta is betting the Facebook farm on the metaverse transforming from its meagre, ignorable existence today to an ubiquitous technology that is impossible to circumvent in our work and social lives. But while its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has planted a virtual flag by renaming Facebook as Meta, Apple also has its eyes squarely on the metaverse, with boss Tim Cook saying in January that the company sees "a lot of potential in this space" and is "investing accordingly".

When Linden Labs, creator of virtual world Second Life, was beta-testing its metaverse-esque alternative reality 20 years ago, it probably thought the future would come sooner rather than later, too. But, with respect, Linden Labs was not Apple.

The world’s second largest company at the time of writing has notably displayed the kind of maturity others can only envy by completely swerving ownership of social media platforms. It doesn’t need them. It has the hardware, it has the ecosystem.

It also has a knack for naming things, the iPod being one great example. The metaverse, on the other hand, has the cringeworthy bang of “information superhighway” off it. If Apple renames it in the process of its next bid for world domination, that alone will be a valuable contribution.