iPod... we hardly knew ye.

The demise of the venerable old iPod has been predicted many times. With each new iPhone announcement from Apple it was generally expected that  the music-baring beast of burden would be chopped from the roster, only to see it march on against the tide. A betamax dancing alone at a Bluray-only night club. A Dickensian Spectrum 48k peering forlornly through the window of a next-gen console restaurant. 

Until, later than predicted but in no way a surprise, the curtain was quietly brought down during the recent release of the iPhone 6. No announcement, no fanfare, just the hasty removal of the product from the Apple website. A silent death for a device that only wanted to sing.

So why should we mourn? In this world of solid state ultra portability, who would want to carry an actual hard disk around in their pocket? Who on earth needed to carry their entire music collection with them?

Well, me, for one. And I'm not alone if the many other iPod Classic obituaries are anything to go by. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm by no means an Apple fan. In fact, I have never really got on with their products. Apple Macs felt too counter-intuitive for my liking; iPhones too restrictive. Great devices certainly, ground breaking some might say, but not for me. I "got" Windows and Android gave more freedom.

But the iPod, and more precisely the iPod Classic as it became known when smaller versions arrived, was something different. It did one thing and it did it very well. Yes, it could play games and videos on the tiny screen, but no one ever did. It couldn't take your heart-rate, point you north, answer a call  or take a picture. But it could play music.

Many Audiophiles would tell you that there were better portable audio players available, allowing lossless playback of FLAC files amongst others. And the quality of these music files is undoubted. A lossless file contains an almost perfect copy of the original track as recorded, whereas other formats including MP3 can often digitally remove 50-90% of the original track quality during compression. No, the problem was that the devices were awkward, ugly, unintuitive beasts. I know, I tried them.

I wanted my iRiver H320 to be the all conquering hero, taking every format in its stride at full HD quality. Instead it was a clumpy, grumpy, troll of a device. Big on promise, slow on delivery. It could play any format you threw at it, certainly, but you would lose heart and seriously consider throwing yourself off a cliff before it did so.The Creative Zen was little better. Likewise devices from iAudio and Sony. The iPod Classic beat them all. It was deceptively easy to use, yet full of playback features. The sound was excellent and the size? Well, size may not be everything, but 160gb in your back pocket could hold all but the most completist of collections. It's true that on any journey only a tiny percentage of tracks would be listened too, but with no more effort than carrying a fraction of your collection, why not carry it all? It meant the option was always there to select from any track you owned and choosing "Shuffle All" became a genuine surprise. What on earth was coming up next? 

My classic currently holds 131gb of music. That is, according to iTunes, 22,991 tracks or nearly 61 days of total listening time. It's a wary user that selects "random shuffle all" in public with this thing. It will embarrass me with the choice. In fact it delights in doing so. 

But there you go, I've finally mentioned the one major drawback of the iPod. iTunes. The one and only programme that allows you direct access to the storage within the device. To be honest, I got over this restriction many moons ago and instead embraced iTunes, understanding that I was being played by Apple and there were better programmes out there. But in the end I came to love the programme, to the point I am currently boycotting Vers 11 updates because Apple, as they do, decided they knew how I liked to use my device better than I did and removed some of the best functionality in favour of flashier and less usable features. Thanks but no thanks. I'll stick with Vers 10.

But in truth, it's not really the passing of the iPod classic itself that prompted me to write a eulogy. I tend not to get sentimental about such things because I am always excited about the "next big thing". And the advances in solid state storage means we will very soon have the capacity to store just as music with just as much functionality on better devices. The quiet hum and whirr of the iPod hard-drive will be thing of the past.

No, what has me feeling sentimental is that the death of the Classic represents the death of a concept that is pretty much the same age as I am. A concept that has been part of my life since I was old enough to understand it. In all intents and purposes, the death of the iPod is really the death of the Walkman, or at least what the Walkman gave us. Portable music. 

Yes, the portable cassette player died years ago, but the concept of a standalone portable music player continued from the Walkman itself, and in the form of the portable CD player, which I never had, to DAT players and Minidiscs, which I did. We eventually landed on digital audio file players, which soon became incorporated with phones, along with cameras and every other feature you could think of.

So what's the difference? Phone or iPod... they both still play music. True, but when was the last time you merely listened to music on your phone? When you weren't jogging, texting or surfing as well? Being interrupted by a call or whatsapp? Facebooking or taking selfies? That's what we are losing. Almost 40 years of devices that demanded your attention for one thing alone. Devices that allowed privacy in a crowded world so there was only you and the music you chose... choices that in some small way defined you. 

It represents the long journeys in a car with your walkman and stack of tapes or an iPod and every album you own.

It represents the playslists you spent hours perfecting or the mix-tapes you carefully recorded from the previous weekend's chart show. 

It represents young kids finding their own musical identity or discovering the music of their parents. 

It represents just you and the music. No interruptions.

As with my Walkmans, Minidisk and MP3 players of the past, my current iPod Classic has shared many journeys with me. It has been my constant companion through Kenyan drought and the humid jungles of Borneo. Typhoons in Vietnam and dust storms in Cambodia. Remote desert islands and freezing mountains. It even survived been trod on by a hapless security guard in Qatar. 

In the end, it's a small matter. Gadgets come and go. But I will miss the iPod Classic. And you bet the next time I see one of the few remaining boxes in an IT shop I will buy it against the day my current little chum meets its maker.