A vassal of technology in a world of strange gadgets

Country Living with Francis Farragher

You really know that life is passing you by when you read something in the newspapers about a piece of high-tech equipment – which has never touched your life    experience – that is being discontinued.      Last week, there were various bits and pieces in the papers about the demise of the iPod, with all the grieving obituaries recalling the various windows of happiness that this little device had given them in their lives.

There may at times, over the past 21 years since its introduction in 2001, have been one, or maybe two, occasions when a stray thought entered my mind that I should consider the purchase of an iPod.

Friends of mine, who are into music, boasted about its capacity for holding thousands of songs in an electronic pouch that would fit in the palm of your hand and input high-fidelity sound into your ears.

Once, around 30-years ago, I had contemplated the purchase of a Walkman, but instead about a decade later, I purchased one of those tiny transistor radios which would fit into the top pocket of a shirt and keep me informed on local, national and world affairs.

Apparently, from reading what knowledgeable people know about these gadgets, the iPod over two decades was a real ‘game changer’ from Apple, who at the time were struggling to hit the right note in that rather strange world of music and technology.

Somewhere, along the way I lost my longing (or thought I had) for new gadgets, after ‘breaking the bank’ in the mid-1970s to buy a Toshiba tape recorder and a Playmate transistor radio, the latter having the rather wondrous facility at the time of being used with either battery or mains power.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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