iPod: I love you, you're perfect, now change

Apple's ingenious music player is 5 years old -- gorgeous, exciting, tempting. So why do I often wish it had never been invented?

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Books, Technology & Business, Music, Apple, Steve Jobs, Reviews, Book reviews, ipod, Farhad Manjoo, blogosphere

Oct. 23, 2006 | The tech journalist Steven Levy calls his new book about the iPod "The Perfect Thing," a title that seems to skip past the boundaries of mere affection and into a land of wild-eyed cultish idolatry. Nobody's perfect, you know, and if there's perfection to be found in some earthly thing, the thing is not a six-ounce digital music player made by Apple.

Every honest iPod owner keeps a playlist of Pod-related pet peeves; mine begins much like yours, I bet, with a mournful dirge on its feeble battery, which weakens exponentially with age. The damn thing gets scratched too easily, too. What good is a beautiful white-plastic-and-steel skin if you've got to hide it in a thick slab of plexiglass armor? The iPod can't carry songs from one computer to another (unless you elicit outside help), and the music Apple sells on its online store won't play on any other company's devices. How perfect is that? Worst of all is that the iPod inflames my ADD and encourages my OCD -- it has me worrying, just about every time I'm playing a song, that there's something else somewhere on the enormous hard disk that would better fit the mood. In the age of iPod, listening to music is too often an anxious affair.

So you come to Levy's book with justified fear that this is going to be a valentine, one whose depth of feeling threatens to turn embarrassing. There's not only the hagiographic title but also the book cover, which mimics the look of the iPod, and the flow of the text itself: In order to "spiritually link my book to its subject," Levy has written a collection of free-standing pieces, allowing every copy to have a different -- that is, "Shuffled" -- arrangement. By the time you learn this, you're quite prepared for Levy to divulge that he's also named his kids Mini and Nano, so far does his iPod lust seem to go. You want to tell him to take his Shuffle and get a room.

But then, just a few pages into his introduction, the author mercifully and wonderfully steps back. "The iPod is not perfect, of course," Levy writes, and proceeds to list many of the flaws I put down above. He suggests that the "perfect" in his title isn't supposed to mean "flawless," but something more like (I'm paraphrasing for concision) incredibly interesting and unbelievably awesome in ways you've probably never even thought of. What's perfect about the iPod is the "seemingly uncanny alignment of technology, design, culture, and media" that made it the biggest thing in the world, "the center of just about every controversy in the digital age," Levy says.

There are very few consumer products about which you'd want to read a whole book -- the Google search engine, the first Mac, the Sony Walkman, the VW Beetle. Levy proves that the iPod, which turns five years old today, belongs to that club: It got so big, so fast, so unexpectedly, penetrating so deep into the culture (both the pope and Dick Cheney have one!), its success begs for probing analysis. Levy, who is Newsweek's chief technology correspondent, set out to write the definitive rumination. He asks the big questions and, as he's journalistically dogged and culturally astute, mostly manages to find good answers. How did the iPod change the music business? How has it changed the way we communicate with each other? What's it done for Apple? What does it say about CEO Steve Jobs? I'll suggest an answer to this last question -- Jobs comes off as a nightmare to work for but a true genius, with terabytes of soul -- but for the rest (and, really, for a whole lot more), do consult Levy's fine book. You won't be sorry.

At the moment, though, let's focus on the most important question occasioned by Levy's book and by iPod's fifth birthday: What's it done to the music? I mean to take a wider view here, because the iPod isn't just the iPod -- it's a stand-in for the more general phenomenon of media going digital, leaving the physical realm and coming under the dominion of computers. I wouldn't want to shortchange the transistor radio and the Walkman, but you can make a good case that digitization has altered how we experience music more fundamentally than any technology since the advent of audio recording. First Napster, then iPod: Music is now on-demand, instant, portable -- fast, cheap and out of control. Apple's current top-of-the-line model sells for $350, weighs five ounces, and holds 20,000 songs (it plays videos, too). It won't let you listen to anything you want wherever you want, at the exact moment you desire it -- but it comes damn close. And a device that will allow you infinite choice on demand is surely coming; we'll see it within the decade, from Apple or from someone else, and most of us will have one.

There's undeniable joy in this new situation. Levy writes that "just about anyone who owns an iPod will at one point -- usually when a favorite tune appears spontaneously and the music throbs through the ear buds, making a dull day suddenly come alive -- say or think the following: 'Perfect.'" What he's describing is the euphoria of free music -- unconstrained music, not stolen music. It's this freedom -- the freedom to boogie, let's call it -- that iPod's marketers are getting at in those ubiquitous dancing silhouette ads. Freedom is iPod's biggest selling point.

And yet. Am I the only one who worries that for all its wonders, the iPod has also tremendously complicated our relationship to music -- has made us more mindlessly consumptive of songs, less attentive to the context and the quality of music, and concerned, constantly, with just always getting more, more, more? If you've spent enough time with the iPod -- over the years, I've had four, and there is a new Shuffle in Shanghai with my name on it -- you must recognize the vague worry of which I speak. The iPod is so good. But I can't be the only one who sometimes wishes it hadn't been invented at all.

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