It is a short journey from being achingly cool to technologically obsolete and it gets shorter every year. Even so, the rise and fall of the iPod sets a new standard. Only five years after its launch, sales of the foremost digital player have begun their inevitable decline. And this despite our Queen having acquired her own regal silver 6GB version.

HM's acquisition may point to Apple's problem. iPods (and their annoying lower-case 'i') acquired cachet among youth by being antisocial and irritating. But you can't enrage the suit next to you on the train with de-melodised scratches of psychedelic trance if he himself is i-dialling Arctic Monkeys (as Gordon Brown claims to). Truculent teenagers should not fret. There are always new gizmos round the corner and the latest is always the most apoplexy-inducing.