Adventures in Obsolescence

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As I’ve mentioned at various times, I’m an iPhone user. And before that, I was an iPod user. (I’ve now consolidated into a iPhone-only lifestyle.) So even though I wasn’t a super early adopter, I did (and do) have one of those early all-white, physical scroll wheel, boxy archeo-Pods that probably many of you had at one point or another.

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So when I saw a friend of mine, who’s now in law school, tweeted about the demise of her own iPod and wondered whether someone out there might be have an old one they’d be willing to part with, I figured, what the hell?

I’m still kind of pre-modern in my consumerism. So even after some gadget is well into its planned obsolescence and I’ve replaced it and it’s clear I’m never going to use it again, I just can’t manage to toss something I once found so cool and also dropped a decent amount of money on. And because of that, I have a small tribe of old i-Gadgets totally unused, sitting in boxes or drawers, living on borrowed time, or perhaps subsisting in suspended animation on borrowed time, because I can’t get myself to treat them as worthless and toss them in the trash.

So my non-loss can be her gain.

Now, the true genius of Apple isn’t the technology so much as the design and marketing ability to craft objects that manage to seem beautiful and cutting edge one year but almost embarrassingly dated and clunky a year or two later. But here’s the thing, when I dug out my old boxy archeo-Pod, I realized that it had come full circle. It wasn’t just old and outdated and something I felt vaguely embarrassed ever to have thought was cool. It had come full cirlce. It seemed almost Retro. It had gone from cool, to clunky and then reemerged to a second life as Retro, as though you might find them sold in small boutiques with Sixties-era gadgets, 70s lunch boxes and similar artifacts of our past.

Am I alone in this?

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