iCame. iSaw. iPod.

I was probably thirteen when I first heard of the iPod. Back then, in the early 2000s, the concept of an ‘MP3 player’ had already realised, even if only just, and had found its way into the hands of early adopters. Given that Apple was still a hardcore computer manufacturer then, their announcement of the iPod didn’t exactly tickle my curiosity.

However, when my uncle—the most avant-garde tech user of my family—bought an iPod mini to replace his gum pack-like Philips music player some years later, I got a chance to give it a whirl. To my surprise, the device left me thoroughly impressed. In the flesh the device was radically much cooler than what I’d seen in tech articles. It was made mostly of shiny anodised aluminium. It employed a tiny four-gigabyte hard drive to store songs. And the interface included the famous Click Wheel. Having only used a dull, unresponsive trackpad on laptops before, I was blown by this magic wheel of speed and tactility. With other music players the volume of sound was usually just about adequate for earphones and most definitely inadequate for large headphones, but here, with the iPod, there was a surfeit. Apple seemed to have included an amplifier powerful enough to slake the desires of every head-banger in the 2000s. It was properly awesome.

Before I knew it, the iPod had become a huge rave in India. It was without a doubt first a badge of coolness and then a music player. In college you either had an iPod or you didn’t; any other brand of portable music player just didn’t cut it. I was graduating high school then, and predictably, I didn’t own one. Instead I sported a Philips GoGear that had almost a gigabyte of flash storage and sounded decent. While it certainly beat carrying the cumbersome CD Walkman around, I knew I had to get my hands on an iPod.

It was around that time the new iPod nano was set to go on sale. Successor to the iPod mini, it was about the size of a pocket mirror, offered up to eight gigabytes of flash storage, and was the first model capable of playing videos. I tried my luck when my dad made a business trip to the US. I innocently offered that it might be cheaper to buy an iPod there than in India. To my great surprise, he agreed!

My dad returned to his hotel room from the nearby Target store and phoned me to tell me that he’d bought it. I was thoroughly ecstatic, but I could sense that he shared little of my emotion. I particularly remember how chagrined he was that the iPod had powered on fine but had shipped with no sample songs with which to test the audio playback. Instead the matchbox of a device demanded that it be connected to something called iTunes to sync music. He added gruffly, ‘149 dollars and nothing in it to play!’ or words to that effect. I quietly chuckled.

When I finally had the iPod in my hands I fiddled with it for hours on end. I’d play some music. I’d tweak the equaliser. I’d try another pair of earphones. I’d download some free movie trailers from iTunes and watch those. Heck I’d even sync contacts and notes from my Outlook to see how they appeared on the tiny display.

Today—ten years on—it’s still alive, and is my constant companion to the gym every morning. The display has formed a few vertical lines and the battery runs down more frequently, but other than that, she sings just fine. These days though, I simply turn on the iPod while entering the gym, listen to an audiobook for about fifty minutes, and then turn it off as I get into the car.

Apple announced last month that they would no longer sell the iPod nano and the iPod shuffle, making the iPod touch the last standing iPod model. Bearing in mind that the iPod touch is practically an iPhone sans the mobile module, it’s safe to say that the iPod brand is dead.

Is it a bad idea? No, not really. I’m actually surprised that Apple decided to keep the product alive for so long amidst smartphones and Android-based music players. People have long since stopped connecting their devices to their computers to ‘sync’ media. Online music is the norm.

Will I lament its death? Yes, but to be more specific, it’s not the product I’ll miss so much as the concept, and the company’s ability to wow the world with a new generation of meaner and sleeker devices every few years. The iPod started life looking like a brick with a tiny display and a capacitive wheel on it, but over the years assumed more diminutive forms.

The first generation iPod shuffle was the size of a glue stick tube and had a full-size USB connector. With the second generation, they ditched the USB connector altogether and found a way to sync media using only the 3.5mm audio jack. This allowed them to make the shuffle really compact and even clippable, just like a clothes peg. And suddenly you wore an iPod, and not carried one around. It’s this sort of innovation that made me believe Apple products were seriously cool.

Don’t get me wrong though. Apple still makes cool (and shamelessly expensive) products, but it’s just that a great deal of innovation these days is fixed on that one device that eclipses all other material things in our daily lives. With our entire collection of music now living along with our emails, texts, and videos of cats falling into the sink, I fear that a tangible identity for music and music lovers is lost for good.

Owning a mobile phone was pretty much a necessity even ten or fifteen years ago, whereas owning an iPod was not. But if you owned one, it meant that you loved music enough to invest in the one of the top portable music players in the market. The iPod was to music lovers what the Xbox and the PlayStation is to gamers—a way of identifying themselves in a crowd that either loves music or is indifferent to it. In the US you could order an iPod from the Apple Store with a custom message laser-engraved on the back, making the iPod a very personal and special music device. Fans of the popular American TV show, The Office, might recognise its romantic element in the show, where Jim and Pam, the prime couple, share a pivotal scene with one.

The iPod’s presence showed even while buying complementing audio gear. You could rest assured that car stereos and home theatres that bore the ‘Made for iPod’ label on their packaging would work readily with your iPod without any fuss. You could also confidently buy headphones without any fear of an impedance mismatch.

Picture of the 'Made for iPod' label lifted from an Apple page.

Today, music is more evolved; music is more accessible, and is all backed up in a cloud we can’t see. I love the convenience we have today, I really do. I love how my playlists show up exactly the same way on my phone, my PC, and my tablet. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that with each passing year, music is becoming more of a service to which we subscribe periodically and less of that special something you got for your birthday or for Christmas.

On the bright side, iPod will score big on nostalgia points in the years to come. I imagine there will be iPod memorabilia flooding the online stores soon enough. And my t-shirt that now pays tribute to the old cassette era will soon be joined by another one for the good old iPod that sang aloud for a good fifteen years without pause.

Until next time...
Vignesh

Really Wired Stuff

You know, it's true that we've exchanged more hellos since the advent and proliferation of mobile telephony—well—at least, in the sense that phones these days have enough charge just to send out a quick, mistyped hello before turning into a pocket mirror and mobile networks these days hold up long enough to let us holler a few garbled hellos before moving on to serve customers of another dimension.

Well, the truth sickens me more than you can imagine. It sickens me that somewhere along the way, showing the world an excessively filtered image of our least-ugly toenail became more important than a good quality voice call with someone. This change in priority has led our phone manufacturers and network providers to believe that internet quality is more important to customers than call quality. And that mindset is OK—if internet actually worked—but it just doesn't. The connection usually lasts long enough for Google to prompt, 'If you just said something, I didn’t hear what it was.'

So while our gaze is tightly fixed on the interminable ads that YouTube plays, there exists, behind our inattentive backs, a lesser-known, seldom-used network of good-quality voice calls. It's still used quite a lot in most offices, mind you, and in fact, you might have just seen one today or in the last one week. So let me reintroduce you to...

The Great Landline Telephone!

If you're a millennial, you will have seen one of these before for certain, unless of course, you're a Weasley. However, if you're one of those tetchy, young teenagers whose first words were Candy Crush Saga instead of goo-goo ga-ga, here's a rough description of a landline phone: it's a squarish plastic device with a prominent handle on one side of its face. Now that's called the receiver: it's what you slap against your face to hear and speak. To call, you simply lift it, push the numbers on the number pad, and the rest is just like a mobile phone.

The quality of the call isn't going to be earth-shatteringly better, but I assure you that you won't ever have to dial twenty times only to hear a pathetic sorry message about the network's inability to put you through to someone who's practically hugging the cell tower, and redial another forty times to clarify your food order for 'six tea cakes', not 'sixty cakes'.

Right, so it's quite obvious why we can't carry around a wired, textbook-sized phone in our pockets—duh—it doesn't have a selfie camera on the receiver! But here's what we can do—we can consciously locate as many useable landline phones as we can in our everyday surroundings—and actually use them whenever possible. I reckon that if at least one of the two callers is using a landline, the call should be somewhat decent. It beats christening an old owl Errol and tossing it out of the window with a parchment around its leg I suppose.

And tetchy, young teenager, if you're still reading this, know that some landline telephones are sophisticated enough to have a digital display and speed dial. Store your grandmum's number in there, and do you know what you get? Insta-gram!

Until next time...

Vignesh

The Chromiumbook

It’s little wonder the Chromebook never really took off in India. I mean, I’ve done an online search for one just now, and there’s just no solid result. But hold on, what’s a Chromebook, you ask? Simple — it’s Google’s answer to the ever-burgeoning tyranny of slow, bloated Windows PCs, which aims to deliver fast and easy computing to anyone who lives only on for the internet. And how do they achieve it? They get rid of everything but the Chrome browser, call it Chrome OS, slap it inside a plastic box with a keyboard and sell it to you for a somewhat modest price of ₹16,000. I can almost guess what you're thinking now. Which wasteful addle-head would ever want to buy a boxed web browser that’s already free to begin with for that much money?

In college, I wanted a Chromebook quite badly. Despite owning a couple of computers that worked just fine, I ached for a computing experience that was free of Windows and its cursed Blue Screen of Death. I also longed to be a member of that exclusive Anti-Windows club who always used something special, and something quirky, like a pre-release Linux distro no one had ever heard of, or at least a Macintosh. Obviously, I couldn’t get myself a Macintosh; I valued my kidneys far too much. But I’d seen that club of avant-garde users, yes, and had felt what they felt. They were the ones who sneered at the very sight of a Windows computer, and if ever they had to use one, they did so only with their left hands and reserved the choicest of expletives for when it behaved badly. OK, I’m overstating that now.

Happily, I never bought one because I knew deep down I’d never be able to rationalise a purchase so impractical. But the Chromebook really isn’t all that impractical — it’s just you and the internet, without any hindrances. There’s no antivirus program demanding you to scan drives and renew your subscription, or Windows Update forcing you to quit doing whatever you’re doing to install critical updates, or Internet Explorer haranguing you over some worthless add-ons.

The fact of the matter is that the Chromebook is just here at the wrong time and has no definite, targeted customer. You see, in the western world, getting a Chromebook over a Windows PC can actually be a good idea because it’s far cheaper there than it is in India; it starts at about ₹10,000. A majority of the American schools and colleges are already using Chromebook as their preferred classroom device because it’s easier to configure and deploy. Also, a Chromebook sold in India won’t feature cellular connectivity, and is likely to have only two gigabytes of memory, as opposed to a global model that might have four. With the memory halved, and with only WiFi to connect through, the Chromebook becomes a seriously limited device. And when was the last time you went to an eatery with a proper, working wireless internet connection? See?

A couple of weeks ago, I found another way to whet my old curiosity. I came across something called CloudReady, an open-source operating system based on Chromium OS, which uses the same architecture as Chrome OS. To spare you the confusion, I’ll just call Chromium OS the same as Chrome OS, but without all the colourful makeup that its rich daddy Google buys it. In other words, Chrome would be Dudley Dursley, the chubby, attention-grabbing blowhard of a kid, and Chromium, the other cupboard-dwelling boy who no one ever knew existed. Anyhow, when I went through CloudReady’s documentation, I was glad to know that it had certified support for a model I happened to have lying around at home — a ThinkPad T60. This ten-year old IBM machine was a great companion through college, but was now reduced to being an email-checking machine on a slow Sunday. I just had to do it; I just had to turn it into a Chromium-book.

The CloudReady installation went well, and since then, my dad and I have been taking turns toying with it. I’m happy to report that the experience has been very agreeable so far. Cold boots happen in under ten seconds, all the drivers seem to work flawlessly, the battery lasts a good two hours, and switching users is a cinch. Surprisingly, it’s almost completely free of bugs. Casting the entire screen to a TV seems to get it though, but it’s a minor glitch I can overlook. On the whole, it’s a very good setup for a browser that’s been turned into an operating system.

Would I ever buy a Chromebook, now that I’ve got a glimpse of it through my quasi-Chromebook? Oh heavens, no, I am very much over the Chromebook. Windows may be ridiculously complicated and thick at times, but I simply cannot live without my favourite applications, like Dropbox, iTunes, f.lux, and WordWeb. Here’s what Google could do though — release the Chrome OS officially, as a standalone operating system, so old computers like the T60 can earn a new lease of life. But I know that's never going to happen. I mean, would the Dursleys ever let their Ickle Diddykins get a bad name because a large snake escaped the zoo during their visit? Oh no, they'd have Harry to blame for it.

Until next time...
Vignesh