![]() We made playlists that spoke to the lives we lived at the moment. (I was a junior editor at Macworld trying to pay rent in San Francisco.) But I saved and saved until I could afford one. To get through all your songs, it had this wheel that let you click and click and clickckckckckckckckckckck your way through thousands and thousands of songs. I didn’t even know anyone was making hard drives that small. ![]() It had a 5GB hard drive packed into a device the size of a pack of cigarettes. I still have one, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, because, while Apple design may be the coolest thing around, the company has always, always had shitty taste in music. Nobody who went to the event kept the CDs, they just piled them up on a table at the office. ![]() So everyone got two copies of each album: one on the iPod, the other on a piece of plastic. But they couldn’t legally give out the iPods with MP3s unless they also purchased a copy of every CD. See, Apple pre-loaded the music players-the iPods, but you knew I was talking about iPods-with music from Real Bands. The other reporters came back with those little white MP3 players, and big boxes of compact discs. >Looking at someone's iPod was like looking into their soul. Because like Steve Jobs said that day, with his dad jeans on, "you can fit your whole music library in your pocket. It was your music.īut that iPod event-the Apple "music" event-changed everything else that would come after, for Apple and the rest of us, too. You had to make choices, because you couldn’t have it all. That preciousness led to a kind of curation you don’t really see anymore. You had to work hard to get money to pay for compact discs or cassettes or long play vinyl records. Since its advent, recorded music had been a scarce commodity. >"You can fit your whole music library in your pocket. And, for me at least, that music was free. Suddenly, you could download a whole album's worth of music to your computer. It was compressed in such a way that it was easy to download, and yet sounded good to most normal people. It wasn't the greatest audio format, but it was good enough. When the 1990s were getting older, there was this crazy new music format called MP3. Other times, the networks and services those gadgets depend on to keep running go away entirely. Technology marches forward so rapidly that even if you could replace a broken part-which often you can't-doing so just wouldn't make any sense. This is not the case with gadgets-even though, for many of us, our old gadgets were way more important than our old cars. Maybe some day it'll be old enough that you'll get thumbs-ups from cool kids as you putter down the street in your charmingly vintage car. If you're willing to maintain it, you can keep driving it basically forever. You can love a car and keep on loving it as long as you don't crash it. Have you ever loved a car? Maybe it was an old truck you drove for hundreds of thousands of miles, or maybe it was your very first car: where you had your very first beer and your very first kiss.
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