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Brian Lehrer: No, that's not The Brian Lehrer Show theme music, is it?

Speaker 2: iPod, a thousand songs in your pocket.

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Brian Lehrer: That's from the first-ever commercial for the iPod back in October of 2001. That song is called Take California by the Propellerheads. By now, you may have heard that on Tuesday, Apple officially stopped production of the iPod Touch after nearly 22 years of iPod. Now, listeners, we're going to open the phones for your iPod farewells. How did the iPod change your relationship with music? Were you an early adopter and what did it feel like to have 1,000 songs in your pocket? What's the one song that will always remind you of your iPod?

Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC. Who has an iPod story, an iPod memory, an iPod moment that will stay with you as the device is put to rest? 212-433-9692. If you just, this week, dug out your iPod since you've heard the news, maybe tweet us a picture. Maybe you were able to plug it back in and spin that scroll wheel one last time. What kinds of music did you find on your old iPod? Did it bring you back to a certain time and place or just make you cringe? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Lynn in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lynn.

Lynn: Hello. Let me turn off the radio. Alexa, turn it off.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Alexa, turn it off.

Lynn: Hello. Hi.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Hi, Lynn You had an iPod?

Lynn: Yes. I had one of the very, very first ones, if not the first one. I'm an older person, I'm 68. I was raising my twin nephews. They were about eight years old. I said, "Something's wrong with my iPod." They looked at it, oh, because they were saying about apps. I said, "Where do I find these things apps?" They looked and they said, "You don't have any apps." We went to the Apple store to say, "What's wrong with my iPod?"

They looked it like it was like an old dinosaur and said, "This is the first one and this was before apps." I didn't know about any of that and I just thought it was very funny that I didn't even know what I was carrying other than putting music on it. There were no apps on my very first iPod.

Brian Lehrer: That's the first time you learned about apps. Lynn, good story. Thank you very much. Andrea in Brooklyn. Hi, Andrea, you're on WNYC.

Andrea: Hey, Brian, this is the Andrea that keeps writing you up for mayor in Brooklyn, which I did again, by the way, this last time.

Brian Lehrer: I was wondering who that weirdo was. [chuckles]

Andrea: It was me. It's me. I love your show and we all adore you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Andrea: You're welcome. My story is that it's not a great story though. My story is that I was wearing my headphones. Again, you think you're aware and I was riding the subway, my normal working-- I was working at that time at the same place so I would see the same people on the subway in the morning. This homeless guy, and I thought I was aware, he pushed me towards the track, towards the subway tracks.

I was completely in shock, and this gentleman that I saw every morning jumped in front of me and said-- because he was coming for a second push. He said, "Stay away from her." I didn't know who this guy was, he saved my life. Then from that moment on, I have never worn headphones, iPod without my back up against a wall.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Of course, that story, theoretically, it could have been told before the iPod because there was the Walkman, there was the Discman where people were using headphones walking around the city, but that's your iPod memory. Thank you very much. Robert in Brooklyn, your own WNYC. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Hey, Brian. This is really sad. I have probably 18 or 20-year-old iPod. My father bought me, filled with 80GB of music that I can't recreate. I don't know where a lot of the music was given by friends. We'd plug in our iPods in each other's computer and trade music, give music. There's a playlist I can't ever recreate so I still have it, I still use it. I refuse to put music on my phone because I want it all in one place. I think the Edward Hawkins Trio, which is a gospel group was a group that I have on there that I still listen to whenever I hear that song when--

Brian Lehrer: Is it Oh Happy Day, that song?

Robert: Yes, it is, exactly. When I saw the documentary, that Questlove won, and I heard, I went and found my iPod because it was just so exciting to hear it live. I went on eBay, I'm going to buy another one when-- because you can't get them anymore and it's very sad.

Brian Lehrer: Why don't you just put stuff on your phone, that's the iPod plus you can call people.

Robert: Because it runs down the battery. I can't put 80GB of music on my phone and I really want to have everything with me, so it stays plugged in. The battery barely works anymore, so it's really sad that they're abandoning it. It's really very sad.

Brian Lehrer: Nostalgia for the iPod from Robert in Brooklyn. Robert, thank you very much. Joining me now is Tripp Mickle who covers Apple for the New York Times. He's the author of the recent book, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul. His piece about this in the Times is titled Farewell to the iPod. Tripp, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Tripp Mickle: Yes, yes, I'm here.

Brian Lehrer: Take us back. What were people's first impressions of the product and how much thought did the designers at Apple put into it because I certainly remember people saying, this was one of those, this changes everything, product.

Tripp Mickle: It's funny. I talked to one of the leading engineers on it and I said, "What were your ambitions for this?" He said, "Well, we just wanted to sell more Macintoshes" which is hilarious when you think about it because it became so much more than that. On that first introduction, the reaction to it was kind of meh. There just wasn't a huge amount of uptake, and part of the reason that was was because it costs $399. It was the early days of digital music players.

There was just nothing in the market at that price point, and so it was a particularly hard sell, and it was a hard sell in part because Apple, to transfer music onto the iPod, those early iPods, you had to have a Macintosh. Apple only had about a 2% share of the computer market at the time so very few people had Macintoshes. The iMac itself was really popular but Apple wasn't the brand that it is today. The iPod is what made it that brand.

Brian Lehrer: I seem to have a memory, maybe it's a false memory of-- because I didn't have a Mac in those days of transferring music from a windows-based PC to an iPod. Did I not actually do that?

Tripp Mickle: You did it, you did it. It just took them about three years for them to make that possible. That was one of the strokes of brilliance at Apple was there was a little bit of a debate internally about, do we extend this to windows PCs and allow iTunes, which was the software system that made it seamless to transfer digital music from a computer to the iPod. Do we make that available on the largest network of computers in the world? Steve Jobs was actually against it.

Here was this guy who really believed in creating a walled garden and that everybody should own Apple products, and Apple products should connect with Apple products seamlessly. It took some persuasion on behalf of his engineers and senior executives for him to come around to buy into that idea and it really changed Apple forever.

Brian Lehrer: Jacqueline in Nassau County has an iPod story. Hi, Jacqueline, you're on WNYC.

Jacqueline: Hi, Brian. I have an old iPod and when the band that used to go by Lady Antebellum, and now I think they call themselves Lady A released their first album, I downloaded it on my iPod, and there was a song called Emily on that iPod that I love so much. Then over time, I stopped using the iPod.

One day, I went to look for the song on my iPhone, on Spotify, and the song had completely disappeared. It just did not exist anymore on the album. I searched for it everywhere. I've never been able to find that song. I don't know what happened to it, and so I keep this old iPod and the charger just so I can listen to that one song.

Brian Lehrer: The one-song device. Maybe there's a way you can upload it out of your iPod and then download it on your phone, but that's a good story. Stephie in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Stephie.

Stephie: Hi, Brian. It's so great to be here with you. I got an iPod when I was in college and I spent a semester studying abroad in Ireland in Cork City. I was mainly focusing on learning traditional Irish fiddle music on the fiddle, and so I brought this iPod around to all my lessons in different pub sessions that were happening. I had a little external microphone I attached to it and recorded all this amazing Irish music while in Ireland and I really cherish all those recordings I still have them now and I wouldn't have been able to make those recordings if I hadn't had the iPod. I could have brought another recorder but it was so easy to have that

Brian Lehrer: Your iPod memory with studying and best study abroad ever, it sounds like. Tripp, can we talk for a second about how the iPod changed music. Did it change the music that was made? I'm thinking about for example these days when we talk about music services like Spotify we tend to talk about how underpaid most artists are, making pennies per stream but when iTunes and the iPod came out, artists were very quick to support the digital and physical apple products, you write at the Time a service called Napster.

Some of us remember Napster and the controversies around it, was tormenting the music industry with free music sharing that was technically Bootleg? Did it therefore change the way music got made and what kinds of songs even became popular?

Tripp Mickle: I don't know that it changed the way music was made, but it certainly changed, it created a revival of the single if you will, because up until that point the music industry had really thrived on the back of the album and the selling CDs. You would have to buy 15 songs to get that one hit if it was an artist who put out an album with a single good track on it. The arrival of the 99 cents song really revived the single.

In many ways that's a bit of what we continue to deal with this day and age. The album itself is a bit of a lost art or it's still pursued by some artists but it's not nearly as, I don't know, there's not nearly as much thought put into that as there once was.

Brian Lehrer: One band that really hits its wagon to the apple horse was U2 in 2004 that Rock Band cut a deal with Apple to sell custom iPods promoting the band's forthcoming album. The player actually came preloaded with the band's album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. I had forgotten about that until I read it prepping for this. Was U2 the only band to get their music preloaded onto an iPod?

Tripp Mickle: Yes. As best as I can recall they were. Funny enough about that deal was negotiated by Jimmy Iovine who many years later sold his company beats to Apple and that became the foundation for Apple music because he had a streaming service called Beats Music that he'd created. In a strange way the service that Apple offers now for music is connected directly to what it was doing in the iPod age.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get a couple more iPod memories in here before we run out of time. Carra in Nassau County. You're on WNYC, hi Carra.

Karen: Hello Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Carra tell us your iPad story.

Karen: Can you hear me? I'm Karen, hi.

Brian Lehrer: Oh Karen, I'm sorry. We got your name wrong. Yes, go ahead.

[crosstalk]

Karen: It's quite all right. I was actually living in England at the time and I got an iPod shortly before I became pregnant with my first child. I loaded that iPod with a couple of 100 songs that I played throughout my pregnancy. Working on the idea that maybe when born my daughter would recognize all these sounds that she heard while in utero. That iPod was loaded with everything from like jazz and the great American songbook, [unintelligible 00:14:01], Motown, American Folk and of course lullabies.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, and so it became part of your pregnancy. Jessica in Brooklyn you're going to get the last one. We have 15 seconds for you, hi.

Jessica: Oh, hello. Great. For me I was also first generation iPod. When I moved to New York City in 2005 that was right when the screen went from the original Black and white to color. It also had a click wheel so before we didn't have the click wheel that came in. In the very, very beginning there used to be this other company called Cover Flow. You could go in and beta and upload the album artwork. When I first moved in New York City in 2005, I would sit there and I would upload the album artwork in my downtime at work. That was part one.

Part two was--

Brian Lehrer: We're not going to have time for part two. I'm sorry to say but part one was a great story and we're going to go out with a little bit of Vertigo by U2, one of the first collaborations between the band and Apple but first we thank Tripp Mickle who covers Apple for the New York Times and is author of the book After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul. Now they've lost the iPod. Thanks, Tripp.

Tripp Mickle: Thanks so much for having me.

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