RIP iPod Classic: The "i" that made Apple cool

In the early 2000s, a strange and exciting phenomenon took place. People started walking around with white earphones in their ears. While one could not make out what these earphones were connected to, it caught everyone's fancy. I later learned it was called an iPod, and when I heard about it for the first time, well, I was like what the heck is that?

Actually, I knew what the iPod's core function was. It was an MP3 player at its heart, but unlike many of these MP3 players around the time, it was fast becoming an object of desire and envy. It came and killed the Sony Discman and Walkman, which countless people swore by up until then, because it was this tiny little gadget that could hold a 1,000 songs! Back then, this was a crazy feat.

Last month, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 it also silently killed the iPod Classic, which is the progeny of the original iPod that the late Steve Jobs had showcased back in 2001. A few days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that some of the parts for the Classic are now no longer available, hence there was no choice left but to kill the product. Even today, the 160GB iPod is the ultimate portable music repository. Despite it being tiny, it has a battery life that spans days, and can hold thousands of songs. The iPod became a permanent fixture for me and for many of my generation.

The iPod is also the product that turned the tide for Apple. The original iMac was cool, but the iPod put it on the path and has made Apple the most powerful tech company on the planet. Frankly, it was perhaps the first Apple product many people enjoyed, since its heydays in the 80s, including me.

Though, I personally avoided an iPod for the longest, I wanted the memory space. I dabbled with an Archos PMP, and a few smartphones, before I came to buy an iPod. This was way back in 2006. It had tons of memory and I could load all my music onto the device as well as feature videos. The process was painful as everything passed via Apple's iTunes software, which I still believe is still a pain to use, but once your content was synced, everything worked just as well.

The click wheel was a work of magic, and even today it is one of the most intelligent user interfaces. Its smoothness was sinful. And the same thing was repeated when Apple unveiled the iPhone, the screen was a work of magic and it repeated the same trick with the TouchPad on its laptops.

For me, it was always the combination of the beautiful design, seamless interface and the fact that I could tote around with my entire library in my pocket.

The iPod was also a source of great heartache for me as I owned three. The first one I gave away to a friend who needed a music player, by then I had the new 120 GB Classic. But then, my Classic died as its tiny hard drive gave way and along with it my entire library also went.

At the same time, my PC's disk drive also gave up on me, so I had to download all my music again. But I chuffed along and bought a new 160GB iPod Classic in 2011, and three years on, this is the outgoing model. This one alas died an early death in Phuket in 2012 when it took a tumble and since then I have started backing up my music on the cloud. Google Music, in my case.

This was the biggest issue with the iPod. It was wonderful, but its hard drive was frail and by 2012, streaming services had taken over, especially in the US. So you could now access literally any song from anywhere, through any device.

The iPod Classic was product of a device-centric world, where the device was central to the content. Today, we live in a device agnostic world. Additionally, the 160GB memory of the Classic is an overkill, even today. Apple created smaller, sexier avatars of the iPod - like the mini, the nano and the shuffle, which cannibalised the market for the Classic. By 2007, Apple even stopped advertising the iPod as the best iPod, because by then the iPhone for Apple became the best iPod.

Now, Apple has music services like iTunes Radio and Beats that play music via the internet and this can be accessed on all iPhones, iPads, the iPod Touch or a Windows or OS X PC. There's simply no need for a 160GB iPod for most people.

The combination of the cloud, and the iPhone was the death knell of the iPod, particularly of the iPod Classic. Apple still makes an iPod Touch, which basically is an iPhone minus the phone, but for me it's not an iPod. Heck, I own one but I don't use it at all. I want my 20,000 songs in one place and that's only possible with the iPod Classic. Even today, my 128GB iPhone 6 can't achieve that. Perhaps, it's time to get my old iPod repaired.

I don't know, but the mystique of the iPod goes well beyond its utility. There's a reason why a special U2 version of the iPod came preloaded with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The white earphones, and the white square with a tiny LCD and space-age circular click wheel, represented more than a 1,000 songs in a pocket. It was a style statement, something no gadget had achieved before. Au Revoir, old friend.