Apple killed off the iPod last week and almost nobody noticed. No event, no keynote, not even a decent send-off video with the click wheel spinning in slow motion. Just a one-paragraph press release on May 10th saying the iPod touch (the last iPod model still for sale) is done. "Available while supplies last," was the actual phrase they used, like they were discontinuing a flavor of Pop-Tarts instead of ending a 21-year run.
I've owned four iPods in my life and I still remember exactly where I bought the first one. Fourth-gen click wheel, white, 20GB, from the Circuit City that used to be off Route 9 before it turned into a mattress store and then, eventually, nothing at all. I loaded it up with MP3s I'd ripped off CDs I'd bought at Newbury Comics, dragged the files into iTunes on a beige desktop, and synced it with an actual FireWire cable. That thing survived two years of a daily commute and one unfortunate trip through a washing machine (RIP, briefly, until it turned out click wheel iPods are apparently indestructible: mine worked fine after three days in a bag of rice, which I still don't fully believe).
The touch that just died was never really that iPod anyway. It's basically an iPhone with the phone part removed, and it's been on life support for years, kept around mostly as a cheap way to get kids onto iMessage and FaceTime without buying them an actual phone, or as a $199 dev testing unit for people who don't want to burn a real device on debugging. It hadn't been meaningfully updated since 2019. Nobody I know has bought one new in ages. So in a weird way this isn't really the death of the iPod: that happened years ago, slowly, as phones ate the one job iPods had. This is just Apple finally doing the paperwork.
What gets me is how quiet it was. Steve Jobs stood on a stage in 2001 and said you could fit a thousand songs in your pocket, and that line basically rewired how an entire generation thought about owning music. Twenty-one years later the whole product line gets retired via a press release nobody read past the headline, on a Tuesday, with a phrase, "while supplies last," that sounds like it was written by someone in inventory management rather than marketing. No goodbye tour. No think pieces from Apple itself. Just gone, and the world kept spinning because everyone's phone has been doing the iPod's job since roughly 2012 anyway.
I'll say the actual complaint out loud: the last iPod touch still shipped with Lightning, not USB-C, in 2022, which feels almost defiantly stubborn for a product on its way out the door. Apple's already getting dragged toward USB-C everywhere else because of EU regulation, and here's this dying little device going out clinging to the old port like it's making a point nobody asked it to make.
I dug through a drawer in my closet after reading the news, mostly out of morbid curiosity, and found an iPod Nano from maybe 2009, one of the flat rectangular ones with the tiny screen and the accelerometer that let you shake it to shuffle. It's dead, obviously (the battery in these things gives up whether you use it or not), but it's got actual physical heft to it, a little block of aluminum and glass that feels like an object in a way my phone stopped feeling like one somewhere around the fifth model I owned. There's something almost sad about how disposable everything is now by comparison. You don't keep a phone in a drawer for thirteen years and then dig it out because you were curious whether it still remembered a Death Cab for Cutie album.
Anyway. No more iPods. If you've got one sitting in a drawer somewhere, it's now officially a museum piece rather than a product Apple sells, which I guess is a distinction that matters to precisely nobody except people like me who apparently keep blog posts about this kind of thing going for over a decade.