It’s been 13 years today since the iPod was launched. That’s right, just 13 years ago shuffling our music meant emptying out every CD we owned from that weird polythene carrier case thing we kept them in and picking one up at random.
Here are the many and varied ways in which the iPod has changed our lives since then…
**We’ve Lost Our Failsafe Emergency Mirror
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The CD was like our least favourite type of man: round, shiny and fragile. But don’t forget how useful these bad boys were. Can you use your iPod as an emergency mirror? No. Can you use your iPod as a tiny, shiny table when you’re trying to make a roll up? No, no you can’t. Of course, getting tobacco and foundation smears on your CD rendered it entirely useless, which is why it was only that Princess Diana tribute album your nan bought you that looked like The Borrowers’ dining room table. But still...
**The School Bus Is A Much Quieter Place
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A concept that is deeply hilarious now. Every day we’d drag something the size of a DVD player onto our school bus and casually flicked through a large polythene sleeve book of discs, searching for one to commit to. Occasionally, you might really go wild and stick the play mode on ‘Random’. Because that was exactly what you were.
**Car Journeys Are Far More Musically Predictable
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Some mythical families managed to get the car equivalent of those school shoes which unlocked at the bottom: they had a MEGA music player in the boot that held four or five CDs at a time. There’s nothing like the anticipation you feel while waiting for your Dad’s Bob Dylan to end, wondering what you’ll hear next.
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**Mixtapes No Longer Mean Running Across The Room Frenetically To Cut Out Radio Snippets
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Everyone has fond memories of trying to get Blue to seamlessly meld into the Vengaboys, even if it meant taping over that potentially important/priceless Jimi Hendrix radio recording of your dad’s. To be honest though, the highlights were always decorating the tape with Tippex hearts and stars, and then colouring them in with highlighter. Standard way to get a post-school snog. Dragging a bunch of songs onto a folder on your iTunes just doesn’t have the same frisson, does it?
**Your Mini Discs Still Need To Be Put On Ebay
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Do you remember that time you bullied your parents into spending hundreds of pounds on technology that was impossible to use and almost instantly became obsolete? Probably best to let this one ease into the mists of forgotten time and never mention it again.
**Our Thumbs Now Have Superhuman Strength **
Our opposable thumbs are what separate us from the animals. Thanks to Apple’s inexplicably cumbersome click wheel, a whole generation of us have incredibly muscular thumbs, which will only be a good thing if we find ourselves living in a dystopian wasteland after the revolution.
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**Your Headphones Now Cost As Much As Your Handbag
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Who remembers when the best pair of headphones you could get were £12 at Argos and covered in foam? These days you can easily spend a third of your salary on massive celebrity-endorsed, noise-cancelling sound-beasts, which are essential to drown out the tinny drumming coming from the middle-aged man on your train who is still using his Argos pair from 1997.
**You’ve Built A Playlist For Every Purpose
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Pumped at the gym. Werkin’ at the office. Getting ready for a night out. Benedict Cumberbatch seduction fantasy. Showing-off your amazing singing voice to surprised friends and family. Bus journey in the rain. Imagining a boyfriend’s speech at your funeral. Wholesome baking. Casual-playlist-that-leads-into-sexy-songs. And many, many more. Thank you iPod – you’ve mastered the soundtrack to our lives.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.