This morning I’m thinking about the death of an iPhone 3 and why I’m unaccountably saddened by its demise.

I’m a music lover and a music collector; music accompanies me everywhere. I was the owner of every scroll-wheel iPod beginning with the first model (purchased at the world’s second Apple store in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia). Oddly, however, I haven’t owned a modern-day iPod.

This is because years ago, upon updating to iPhone 4, I kept my decommissioned iPhone 3—I deleted all the purchased apps and the attendant data and repurposed it as my music player. At this point, I can’t recall if the iPod Touch had been introduced—and I haven’t had enough coffee yet to research the topic—but needless to say, my reimagined iPhone 3 either anticipated the iPod Touch or was one of of the earliest work-around equivalents of one.

And that’s where matters have stood these past nine years: on the go, I listened to music on my old iPhone 3. The damn thing never wore out. It held a charge like a champ; always kept in a case and with a screen protector, it looked mint; and it simply worked. Each time I was tempted to buy an actual modern iPod, I gave my old iPhone 3 a spin—critically listening to its musical fidelity, testing its speed in music selection—and always came to the same conclusion—why?

Yearly, the iPhone 3 went to Maine with me. It accompanied me on business trips. And when I crawled into bed at night, it streamed its contents du jour through my Bose Wave Radio. The damn thing just kept doing a good job in its retirement years. Why didn’t I use my current iPhone for music? Well, prior to Apple Music making it a moot point, the available storage on my succession of later iPhones was never enough for a music lover like myself. As I say, I have a lot of music and I like to keep a lot of music with me. This mindset, I assume, accounts for the ongoing existence of modern iPods.

Yesterday, however, death came for my old iPhone 3—or, more precisely, a terminal illness that demanded euthanasia. I noticed that it looked odd sitting in its charging cradle and discovered that the battery had catastrophically swollen, pushing one side of the screen out beyond the bezel and cracking the back of the unit in two places. Remarkably, however, it still worked—because Good Old iPhone 3, I guess. I played Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue on it one last time—it seemed fitting to do so—and then sadly wiped all its contents, all those thousands of songs, reverting it to its factory settings for the first time in nine years.

It was late at night, and I now had to grapple with what to do with it. I wasn’t going to bed and trust that the battery wouldn’t explode while I slept. So I filled a dutch oven full of water, put it in the kitchen sink, and, gulp, dropped the iPhone 3 into it, watching is sink to the bottom. I then covered pot with its massively heavy lid.

I’m thinking of the iPhone 3 this morning because I’m surprised by how its long-expected end saddened me. it felt like putting down a pet. It was, after all, just a tool—and an old tool at that. New and better replacements await. I’m thinking that the feeling has to do with two things:

First, it was the longest-lived Apple product I’ve owned—or rather, the one that I continued regularly to use for the longest time, as opposed to an antique Apple device that one sometimes fires up as a curio—say, the first Apple Powerbook with the roller-ball precursor to the track pad. I’ve been a lifelong user of Apple products because of their technological transparency—when I’m working, they literally melt way, leaving me with the project at hand instead of tech mediation. But I kept the old iPhone 3 long enough for anthropomorphization to surface. Which leads me to the second reason for my sadness.

I think that what the iPhone 3 did—and did four times longer than it served as, well, a phone—the dispensing of music to a music lover—made my relationship with it far more intimate than what exists between tool-user and tool. Its contents mapped to my musical obsessions. It was an emotional time capsule, with certain songs never moving off it for sentimental reasons. It provided non-stop soundtracks to my life, no matter the circumstances. It became a way by which Past Me spoke to Present Me through music—and also provided the ability for Present Me to leave a few melodic messages for Future Me.

So yeah, it was a weird feeling to wipe its aesthetic and musical history and then drown it.

This weekend, probably, I’ll lope into the Apple Store and purchase a space-gray iPod Nano—you know, just like Today’s Hip Youth. And I’m sure I’ll enjoy it—though, I’m certain, not for nine fucking years. It’ll get the musical job done before reasonably expiring in, say, three or four years’ time.

Like my other Apple devices, it’ll be transparent and it’ll be a tool.