My trusty iPod turned six this week — not very old for most things, but pos­i­tively ancient in the world of per­sonal elec­tron­ics in gen­eral and mp3 play­ers in par­tic­u­lar. I haven’t actu­ally owned the thing for quite that long — I received it as a birth­day gift from my par­ents in April 2003. But, Chipmunk’s Mac Ser­ial Decoder tells me that my ‘Pod was the 1425^th man­u­fac­tured dur­ing the sec­ond week of Decem­ber, 2002.

When I got it, my iPod was tiny com­pared to other dig­i­tal music play­ers on the mar­ket, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing its (then) gar­gan­tuan 20GB hard drive. Now of course, it’s twice as thick as the newest hard-drive-based iPods, and has one-fifth the stor­age space. Mine also doesn’t have the dock con­nec­tor, instead hav­ing a full-size FireWire port on top. It did come with a respectable num­ber of acces­sories, though. New iPods come in a box with head­phones, a charg­ing cable, and a lit­tle plas­tic dock insert. Mine, on the other hand, came with head­phones, a wired remote con­trol, a FireWire cable, a mini FireWire adapter, an AC adapter, a case with a belt clip, and a cloth car­ry­ing pouch.

Despite its age, it’s still work­ing like a champ. I had to replace the bat­tery a few years ago, which I think cost me all of five dol­lars. Between when I got my iPod and when I bought the replace­ment though, bat­tery tech­nol­ogy had advanced so much that even now my charges last longer than when the device was brand new. And other than that one fairly sim­ple repair, I’ve never had a prob­lem with it. I’ve been lust­ing after new mod­els for quite awhile, espe­cially the new Touch (and the iPhone), but it’s kind of hard to jus­tify buy­ing a new one when my old one is still per­fectly fine. On the other hand, more peo­ple are start­ing to laugh or ask “what’s that” when they see my iPod, so maybe an upgrade will be in order some­time in the near future.