When I was a freshman in high school, I saved up what was a significant amount of money for a kid and Dad took me to buy an early-gen iTouch. My mind raced at the prospect of being able to listen to music in a fashion that wasn’t solely playing it on my Xbox 360. In addition, i’d be able to play all the hot mobile games at the time, like Doodle Jump and Tap Tap Revenge, as well as watching YouTube wherever I had Wifi.

Little did I realize that the level of convenience in this device would transcend into the world of phones upon the quickly-rising iPhone. It was at its third model at this point, and it became increasingly common to see people with these instead of flip phones and Blackberries. With rising competition from Samsung in its Galaxy and other companies taking notice, it wouldn’t be long before everyone had a smartphone in their hands.

Portable music has been around in some facet for decades. Whether it was a cassette player, a CD player, or an iPod, people had the ability to listen on-the-go. The integration of music into cellular phones made these outlets irrelevant, though, with their superior storage and ease-of-use. While iPod Classics reached up to 160 gigabytes of storage, it didn’t make sense for consumers to carry around two expensive devices.

IPods were simple, yet effective. The IPod Classic’s discontinuation in 2014 is a direct result of their succession within the phone market. Despite once being a hot-ticket item, you’d be hard-pressed to find a comprehensive mp3 player in stores, and Goodwills are littered with speakers that necessitate the 30-pin connector that these devices used instead of our tiny cables nowadays. I have deep nostalgia for enjoying my developmental years in music listening through my 64GB iPod Classic, but they will soon be a relic of my generation, as smartphones put the nail in the coffin.

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