Apple has marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the iPod by sealing a fully charged iPod in a concrete time capsule and ordering thousands of employees to walk to Cupertino on foot to watch it be lowered into the ground, a company-wide pilgrimage the firm describes as «a respectful return to the beginning of the pocket».
The capsule, a steel cylinder packed with a working iPod, a pair of wired earbuds and a printed list of one thousand songs, was carried from the old Apple campus to the new one by a relay of staff who had volunteered to walk the route in shifts. The company said the capsule will be opened in twenty-five years, or sooner if the battery gives out and someone at the ceremony notices the silence.
Employees who could not walk were instructed to stand along the route and hold their old iPods aloft as the capsule passed. Several departments have adopted a morning routine in which staff queue for the elevator in single file while a supervisor counts them in, a practice the company calls «the scroll wheel».
«We are not burying a product,» said a senior Apple official at the ceremony, holding a shovel. «We are burying a promise that one thousand songs will fit in a pocket, and we are asking everyone to walk to it, because that is how far the pocket has come.»
The capsule was lowered at dusk as the crowd stood in silence, and the ceremony concluded when the last of the one thousand songs finished playing from a speaker placed beside the hole.