Be gentle with me this week. My iPod recently died; she was only nine, and I’m still grieving.
I’ve never been an “early adopter,” one of those guys who stands in line all night to pay top dollar for the latest electronic gadget, only to dump it for the first shiny new toy to turn my head. I need to be romanced a little. But when I fall, I fall hard. And when its product-life is over, and death comes as it must to all devices, I’m sad.
I must have been one of the last guys to get an iPhone, having already run through a pager, two cell phones and three Blackberries. Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 (named after the astronauts’ space-pods in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). By the time I was finally ready to buy one in 2008, they were already on the sixth-generation iPod, the “Classic,” boasting a 160GB storage, 32 times larger than the original 5GB model. Consumers had already snapped up more than 100 million of them.
My iPod Classic quickly became my special favorite. Over many months, I uploaded more than 44,000 tunes—from Stephen Foster to the Rolling Stones, Moroccan chants to Spanish classical guitar—from my personal music collection. I took her everywhere, every day. She tagged along in the car. Gently sang me awake every morning in my bedside clock alarm. She was my gym buddy on my daily workouts. She kept me company in the stereo sound dock in the living room. Since she joined the family, she made a threesome on every vacation my wife and I have taken, from Alaska and Hawaii to the UK and much of Europe. She’s been my constant companion.
I know, I know. The English art critic John Ruskin, in a famous 1856 essay, condemned what he called “the pathetic fallacy,” the foolish sentimental notion of writers and poets imputing human emotions and motivations to non-human things (the cruel sea, the sullen sky, the bitter rain, etc.). But since humans have been imposing their own emotional constructs onto animals and natural phenomena for millennia, not to mention our vehicles—our sailing vessels, our trains, our automobiles, our aircraft—why not my iPod?
After all—returning to 2001—it contains what is surely one of cinema’s most poignant end-of-life-sequences, when the astronaut has to disable and shut down HAL, the shipboard computer that’s gone rogue and killed his crewmate. HAL first commands, then cajoles and finally pleads not to be turned off. And as his circuits are disconnected and his sentience leaks away, HAL is ultimately reduced to randomly crooning an old Gay ‘90s ditty before falling unconscious.
Nothing so melodramatic with my little iPod. One morning she just wouldn’t wake up, and no amount of hard rebooting could rouse her. She just displayed a sad little default error message—her last farewell. The guy at the Apple store was sympathetic, gently explaining that they no longer supported those older hard-drive models—had I considered a newer flash-drive version? With 20 percent less storage capacity? As if!
Later, fortunately, I remembered that I had a spare, so we’re back in business—but I know that we’re still only living on borrowed time. iPods and other media storage devices, like CDs and DVDs and their players, are yesterday. Streaming audio and video is tomorrow. Soon all our listening and viewing habits will be shaped not by our own taste and curated collections, but by the whim and caprice of corporate licensing and marketing decisions.
Still, my iPod and I are going to make a run for it. As Harrison Ford’s Deckard says at the end of Blade Runner, fleeing the Los Angeles of 2019 with his replicant lover, “I didn’t know how long we had together. Who does?”
Joel Bellman worked in journalism and local government in Los Angeles for 35 years. He now teaches and writes on politics and pop culture. He can be contacted at jbellman@ca.rr.com
