The dreaded Red X of Death.

Well, it finally happened after nearly nine years of constant use and charging the battery over a thousand times: my 160gb 6th Generation iPod Classic has gone to the great electronics landfill in the sky, where it shall rest eternally among other dead electronics and, overtime, leak hazardous mercury and lead into heaven’s water supply because of their poor recycling program. Ahh, isn’t it beautiful.

But no, actually, I’m pretty devastated. Since I’m a deplorable Luddite trying desperately to cling onto the past as long as possible, I was fearing this day for years. I have an iPhone 4S that still works that I got in 2014, those days are numbered. I finally replaced my shitty old 2009 laptop last year with a barely improved 2019 version of the laptop, I don’t plan on changing that up anytime in the next decade if I can help it. I like things the way I like things, and I hate it when I have to change the way I do things when I already like the the way I like things! DO YOU UNDERSTAND??? And more than most companies, Apple is VERY insistent that I change the way I do things. They don’t like large hard drives, they don’t like headphone jacks, they don’t like me not buying one of their products every .333333333 months. Do these people think that Apple-related enthusiasm grows on trees? Yeah, I’ll just go to the Apple Enthusiasm Bank and withdraw another pocketful of capitalistic eagerness from my well-stocked vault.

So I bit the bullet and went to the Apple Store to buy a 256gb 7th Generation iPod Touch. The Apple Store in downtown Chicago, the one at the south end of the Magnificent Mile. A big, dumb glass building in a pavilion overlooking the Chicago River containing about 900 tattooed, bearded employees with walkie-talkies and tablets stationed every eight feet from one another, like they’re organizing a heist mission. I had the pleasure of being directed to Kevin, then JJ, then Dave, then Will, then finally Ken. It was quite a well-oiled machine, oiled from the blood of Steve Jobs’ horde of Indonesian slave children! Ha! Now there’s a hot take for ya.

Namaste, bro. Welcome to the Apple Store.

The thing is, though, it was demonstrably uncool of me to want to get an iPod Touch in the year 2021, and I could sense the daggers of ridicule shooting out the pearly blue eyeballs of every person I talked to. From Kevin to JJ to Dave to Will to Ken, all the way down the line, the scorn in their voices as they responded to questions like “it has a headphone jack, right?” and “is it compatible with iTunes?” Like I had any fucking idea about any of this shit, I’m just here to drop a few hundred on some dumb appliance I don’t really need and know very little about, please.

I made my way out of there and scrambled up the Mag Mile with a the very real sense of buyer’s remorse that can only come from spending a chunk of money on a device that was probably marketed for children. But hey, the heart wants what it wants! And it wanted the largest amount of hard drive space available on a portable music player with the least amount of money possible that couldn’t be subjected to constant telemarketers and “VOTE JERMAINE T. SMENKINS FOR REPUBLICAN LIBRARY ARCHIVIST LOCAL 181” 3am texts.

I’m looking forward to getting to know my brand new iPod Touch and inevitable anxiety that will ensue when Apple phases them out after inventing a cloud-based microchip that has to be implanted in your gallbladder and uses the sonic waves and vibrations picked up from the squelchy bilirubin breakdown process in order to transmit sound to your auditory cortex but makes everything sound like Gilbert Gottfried playing a banjo. Those without gallbladders will be shit out of luck, though, but they can buy the Apple Gallbladder at 20% off.