Apple kills iPod Classic: another one bites the dust

I've got an old sports Walkmansomewhere in my house. It's a few yards away from a dusty five-CD player.

Both, no doubt, eagerly await the arrival of a new exhibit in the museum of my life: the iPod Classic.

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Technology lovers may mourn the loss of its circular 'click wheel' and prodigious 160GB memory (enough to hold my entire music collection!) but if there's one thing experience teaches, it's that no amount of cool bells and whistleswill save old gadgets from the junk-heap of history.

A metaphor for life?

A metaphor for life, or just testament to the fickleness of consumer culture? Who knows, but no matter how many wistful odes to the iPod Classic Gizmodo publishes, I can't go down that road again. It's just too painful.

I never actually threw away the mix tapes theWalkman used to play. Carefully constructedthrough hours of painstaking selection,running back and forth between stereos, hitting play, record and pause,they turned out to be about as deeply intuitiveas theshuffle function on my iPod. With much less music, of course. Ditto for the five CD-changer.

I swore I'd never get rid of either. But technology companies have a great means for getting customers to change habits. They just stop making the thing you want. Hence my collection of identical LPs, cassettes, CDs and MP3s. Yes, I know each is an evolution of sound and functionality. But really, how many more timescan they make me buySgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

If there's anything truly chilling about Apple's decision to discontinue the iPod Classic, it's the sudden way the product just vanished from the company's web page.

Technology's Trotsky?

One day it's there, a stolid monochromatic reminder of the past, alongside brightly coloured Nanos, Shuffles and Touches, the next, it's gone. The iPod Classic has become technology's latest Trotsky, an aging revolutionary erased from history, its usefulness outlived. But does that make Apple Stalin? And what about the iWatch?

At first blush, I'm tempted to look at the Apple Watchthe same way I first regarded the iPod Classic. I already have a Timex Expedition and I can't even work all of its functions.I think it has a compass, but I'm not sure.

I never wanted a cellphone;I was forced into one of those. I didn't want a smart phone. Now, I begin each day by scrolling through the one tethered to my wall.I have an iPhone, so why do I need another one on my wrist?

But this isn't really about what I need. If I slammed some batteries in that dusty Walkman, it would probablystill work, as would that old mix tape. But if they're obsolete, what would that say about me?

The iPod Classic, once the king, is dead. Long live the iWatch!