Scratch scratch scratch
Or why it hurts so much when you damage a new gadget
“Oh lord oh no, oh god no, no no no, god no, oh no, lord no, oh no lord, no.”
Sound familiar? Like something you’d say if, I don’t know, you just dropped an expensive gadget? On concrete? And bashed it the hell up? And maybe, just maybe, that gadget you dropped on concrete and bashed up was a newly upgraded iPod?
Thought so. Thought so. Yep, I really, really thought so.
As part of The Great Uncoupling™, I’ve been trying to find ways of separating my life from my phone — and one of these was getting an iPod. I’m nothing if not a maximalist, after all.
Why? Well, here’s a surprising retort: I like listening to music. I maintain my own digital library and use my phone to play a lot of it. The issue though is that blasting tunes on my phone is distracting. Social media is a mere swipe away. The urge, pals, cannot be sated.
So, after the Palma 2 e-ink handset didn’t quite fulfil my expectations, I decided to go down a different path and give an iPod a spin. Thankfully, I had one in my desk drawer just waiting to be used. Being a tech journalist has its perks.
The problem, of course, is that the iPod’s not really fit for purpose in the year of our lord 2025. The MP3 player has minimal storage, a depleted battery, and can be unreliable when syncing with modern Macs.
I didn’t want to just splash a whole load of cash upgrading it straight away, so I trialled the old one for several months before — as you can guess — splashing the cash and upgrading it. It was inevitable, like a dog chasing after a postman in the The Beano.
Cash was splashed and my iPod suddenly has a 1TB SSD, 3000mAh battery, and shiny new faceplates.
Unsurprisingly, it was a delight. I installed Rockbox, a third-party OS that allowed me to get the entirety of my library on the machine, and got cracking.
Sidebar: Why did I go for Rockbox and not use the regular OS? Well, iPods using the original operating system have a hard limit on how many tracks they can store. For the model I had, it’s around 40,000-50,000 songs — depending on the amount of metadata they contain. Basically, the device loads the database of all this music directly to RAM, and once that file reaches a size larger than that mode of storage (64MB in my case) the iPod glitches the fuck out. Yes, that’s a scientific term.
After I played around with Rockbox, my life was like an Aladdin song; a whole new world, but one filled with indie classics and art pop, rather than genies and talking parrots.
Until I fucked it. The iPod, not the parrot.
When I look back, I can see it in slow motion. I am getting out of a car at the airport. The iPod is in the top pocket of my suit. My laces are loose. I bend over to fix them and the iPod slides out, hanging in the air, feather-like, before crashing and grinding into the gravel and concrete.
It still worked, thank god it still worked, but the body was scratched and chipped.
Saying it sounds a bit silly, but my heart broke. I think this is a broadly normal reaction. Something new getting dented up is disappointing and saddening, but… why? Why does an experience like this haunt and hang over us?
To me, it’s about damaging the idea of an object.
When you buy something new, especially a gadget, there’s a subconscious belief that this thing will improve your life. The hardware will be your missing puzzle piece, the key to evolving as a human.
My iPod is a great example of this; here was something that could potentially redefine my relationship to music, allowing me to truly get lost in sound without the cruel allure of apps and social media.
Physically denting it was a metaphorical retort to this way of thinking.
Blemishing a new device is a physical reminder, a little death, the moment you realise that it’s nothing special, merely another item that’ll be used and forgotten and resigned to landfill.
A new iPod isn’t a salve to my problems, it’s a regular piece of flawed technology — and mashing it up almost immediately proves that.
That doesn’t stop it hurting though. My lord, it hurts.