iPod units sold

iPod sales are long dead, USPS package volume is still alive, and yet here they are, their curves agreeing on something. The most probable conclusion is that correlations can persist well past the useful lifespan of the things they measure. The universe, in its way, is a hoarder.

iPod shipments dwindled toward near-zero through this period as smartphones finished the job, while USPS package volume fluctuated with e-commerce — holding steady through the 2010s and then surging sharply in 2020 as covid lockdowns turned every household into a mail-order customer. The correlation is two long trends intersecting briefly in the same lockdown window. One was disappearing; the other was unboxing.

So we are left with a dying product and a delivery system it barely uses. Both were shaped by the same decade. One was delivered; one was forgotten.