You wouldn’t imagine that buying an iPod could remain a memorable part of a trip in which I fulfilled a childhood dream, and yet that is the case.
November 2001 saw me fly from London to New York on Concorde, and it was during my five-day stay that the original iPod first went on sale …
Part of that trip involved trekking around Manhattan to get my hands on the magical device, and I’m not alone in feeling nostalgic about it: a few years ago, a couple of my colleagues shared their own memories.
The iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player, nor was it the first model I’d owned. My first one was the MPMan F10, which had just enough flash storage to store a single album at a time. Swapping out that one album required connecting it to a laptop.
But the iPod was a revolutionary product. Apple promoted it as enabling you to carry a thousand songs in your pocket, meaning that for the first time we could have 70 or 80 albums on tap wherever we were.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and even months later I still felt that way about my iPod. I almost never left home without it.
Another of Apple’s taglines for the device was “add a soundtrack to your life.” It was reflective of the way a movie can depict something incredibly ordinary – like a guy dropping off his kids at the school gates, or a woman looking thoughtful as she drinks a cup of coffee – and then add the right music to transform it into an emotional scene.
The concept behind that slogan was that we could transform the ordinary moments in our own lives in much the same way, and in its way that idea was as revolutionary as the device itself. Fast-forward to today and it’s rare that you can look around a train carriage or at people walking down a street without seeing a substantial proportion of them wearing headphones. Scores of people in the same place doing the same thing, but having very different experiences thanks in part to the soundtrack accompanying them at the time.
A couple of years later, I upgraded to the 30GB model, which allowed me to have a significant proportion of my entire music collection loaded at any one time. 2007 completed my iPod journey with a 160GB model: I cannot tell you just how happy it made me to be able to have access to my entire music collection anywhere, anytime. Whether I was just commuting locally or on the other side of the world, I could simply think of an album and immediately play it.
Today, of course, streaming music takes things a step further. We don’t even have to own an album in order to be able to play it anytime, anywhere. That too kind of feels like magic. But I don’t think any music technology step since has ever quite matched the amazing feeling of loading up that first iPod on the day it went on sale.
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