The Best Stuff 9: iPod + MP3

My graduation present from high school was one of the first CD players. Small portables weren't out yet, so this was a component to put on the shelf next to your amp, and it was a heavy beast, shielded to protect users against the laser inside. I spent a good chunk of my paychecks on music; by the time I was 19 a couple years later I had almost 200 discs.

I can remember sitting at my first color Mac several years later wondering how you could hook the computer to a CD jukebox and pick song names from the computer and not need the jewel cases to know what song number you wanted.

Around 2000 Greg Peterson from church didn't know any other Mac users and had an extra copy of SoundJam MP (later sold to Apple to become iTunes). MP3 was impressive, but on my 250 MB hard drive I could rip a couple albums and fill what was left of my hard disk. When 20 gigabyte hard disks became common a few years later MP3 started to make sense. Mixtapes no longer took hours to make.

When the iPod came out I jumped on one of the first models — before they worked easily with Windows, before the iTunes Music Store, back when Apple was a computer company on the rocks and might not survive the next quarter.

The 1G/2G iPod and its interface (photo center) were fantastic. I could be driving and change the volume or skip songs without looking. I could follow a reference in one song (Stevie Wonder Master Blaster) to another song by a different artist (Bob Marley Jammin'). I'd be by myself listening to it and say out loud, "This is the best thing I ever bought."

Apple went to touch buttons and screens and wrecked the iPod's usability as strictly a music player. But they're so rich now they can pretty much do what they want.

This photo of our family's iPods (Madeleine's green Nano and Touch are missing) took a lot of tries because iPods are so dang reflective. I took this photo at night in the dark, manually popping a flash about 20 times around the perimeter of the scene. My beloved old school 2G iPod in the center looks chunkier ... because it is. Plus it's closer to camera, balanced on a toilet paper tube. Compared to today's slender, shiny iPods, this is Christopher Pike's communicator.