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Students of the user interface are in mourning for Apple’s clickwheel, which passed away quietly in Cupertino, California, at the age of 13.

The clickwheel was born in the original iPod in 2001 and died in late 2014 along with the last product to use it, the iPod classic. In iPods, it was supplanted by touchscreens starting with the sixth- generation nano. The iPod itself has been nudged aside by other touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets from Apple and other manufacturers.

Why kill the clickwheel? “We couldn’t get the parts anymore,” Tim Cook told Engadget, explaining that retooling the product for a shrinking music-player market wasn’t worth the exertion.

The final iPod classic’s generous 160 gigabytes of storage will also be missed. The surviving iPod touch tops out at 64 GB and the iPod nano at 16 GB.

But most regrettable of all is the fact that future generations of listeners will never know what it’s like to whiz up and down the contents of a pocketable music library with the circular thumb gesture that made the old clickwheel the simplest, easiest, and most pleasurable to-use music access interface of all time.

The clickwheel is survived by a crude vestige in the iPod shuffle, but that’s a click- only wheel, with no thumb swipe and no related display.