Apple has quietly discontinued the iPod Classic.
At their recent keynote, Apple introduced two new iPhones, a watch, and a mobile payment system. Apple updated their website, adding these products. After the update, one thing was missing… the no-frills iPod.
Apple is still selling the iPod Touch, Nano, and Shuffle. The iPod with the largest storage capacity is now the Touch, holding 64 GB. The iPod Classic previously held up to 160 GB. The new iPhone 6 comes closest to this amount with 128 GB of storage.
The discontinuation is surely the result of declining sales. CNET says Apple has sold less than 20 million iPods in 2014, less than half the amount they sold in 2013. In 2009 Apple sold 54.83 million iPods.
The future of music does not include an Apple device that holds 40,000 songs and fits in your pocket.
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Nina Ulloa covers breaking news, tech, and more. Follow her on Twitter: @nine_u
Nina, who are you?
i don’t understand the reasoning behind this question
You’re not allowed to report news that goes against Fareplay’s utopian dreams. It make him feel weird inside.
GGG don’t you ever get bored with your fascination of moi? Although I have decided to start doing a radio show called “Dinosaur Tracks” it will be an oldies show, natch.
Nina, I ask who you are because you are apparently an official contributor to DMN and you’re new. I ‘binged’ your name and I didn’t get anything. I knew who Helene was and who Ari is, but no Nina. Paul doesn’t have a masthead; hence the nature of my question.
I’m not hard to find for those who are interested and I write for Huff Po as William Buckley Jr. And a FB page and website under FarePlay.
No, they have a device that can access every song ever recorded… and it fits on your arm.
the iPhone? “fits on your arm” is an odd choice of words.
i think he meant the watch will fit on your arm and then control your listening on iPhone/ipad/laptop.
>> CNET says Apple has sold less than 20 million iPods in 2014,
>> less than half the amount they sold in 2013. In 2009 Apple
>> sold 54.83 million iPods.
These two sentences are so important. Both consumers & developers are emphasizing connectivity over storage, & phone service providers have long been rearranging their plans to take advantage of this. This sets the stage for an access-driven recorded music economy in the future, rather than an ownership-driven economy. Regardless of whether or not you cow tow to this fact, if you don’t at least acknowledge it now, you’re not going to be well positioned to make money off of recorded music in the years to come.
Love my IPod and am thinking about getting a new one to store loss less music files. .
“The future of Music doesn’t include an Apple device that holds 40,000 songs and fits in your pocket.”
Seems like a disingenuous comment for a site that continually points out that those 40,000 songs are mostly pirated.
I remember buying my 80 GB and thinking it would last me forever. It stopped working last week.
Like all Apple products from the new phones to the watch it’s all about cloud it’s not the product it’s the cloud.
It’s sad… I think there is currently a market for a 2TB device…
But lets face it if you are apple and you want to push Beats streaming services, then the idea to keep iphone, ipad memory small, and without expandable microSD memory cards and at the same time kill off big storage is probably the right strategy to grow Beats.
still got my 160 gig iPod classic from 2007. still works perfectly fine, but haven’t used it in over two years since my 64 gig iPhone holds enough music for my everyday needs – and it’s thinner, lighter, faster, more intuitive, and does so much more. the shift was inevitable, and now that there’s a 128 gig iPhone on the market things are looking even better. maybe the iPhone will get up to 256 gigs soon enough.
people who think the iPhone’s capacity will stay low because “everybody streams music now” isn’t thinking about photos or video content. most people these days use their iPhone as their primary camera and video device, and that still takes up a ton of hard drive space.
RIP iPod classic – but in and of itself, its discontinuation isn’t some terrible omen.
The 128 GB iPhone 6 costs roughly three times as much as the discontinued 160 GB iPod Classic. It’s completely out of reach for children and most adolescents; the 128 GB iPhone 6 costs about $800 without a wireless phone contract.
Still, the iPhone 6 does invalidate my recent comment that it had been about 7 years since a new mass market devices with a storage capacity over 64 GB had been brought to market.
Many participants here seem to have lost sight that the recording companies have to make recordings available in the formats which work well on the hardware customers are buying. What is developing for MP3/AAC buyers is a game of “shuffle”, where files have to be constantly migrated on and off the small-capacity device, once the consumer has acquired more than a hundred or two hundred albums, and that is a pain in the butt compared to streaming.
(I’m writing this as an elderly data hog with an iPod full at 400 albums, and thousands of CDs remaining to be ripped to MP3. I like owning stuff, but I recognize I’m in a fading & aging minority.)
Good!
The iPod sucked anyway. Never liked it’s shitty sound or the way the music is organized.
http://Www.anythingbutipod.com
Yea! I hate having my music organized by some stupid way, like alphabetically by artist name!
Hope there will always be a place for the “old” ipods.
What gives these corporations the right to “kill off” any product? Consumers have long memories and they resent shelling out cash for these Mission Impossible products that self destruct… or have obsolescence built into them.
I’m an iPod heavy user but I never owned a Classic version as I feel them too big. Always used a Nano, my favorite one is the previous generation with the “square” model. It was so convenient. I think with the Cloud and iTunes match, fewer people feel the need to always carry 40’000 in their pocket.
What gives these corporations the right to “kill off” any product?
I hope that was meant as a joke. All products have planned obsolescence built into their design parameters. Always have. No product is made to last “forever” (whatever that is).
I am a new product consumer. My Nook is now out of date at 3 yrs old, and will not do half what a new Nook will do. My Motorola Droid phone is two yrs old – the battery won’t make it another six months, so it’s time to upgrade. Plus it’s only a 4″ screen and I desire a larger screen and better camera resolution.
I don’t store music on my phone. I have a Spotify account, and I use Soundcloud and Bandcamp regularly for “local” music. I work out daily at the gym, strap the phone to my upper arm, dial up the gym’s wi-fi, and stream whatever music I’d like for that hour that I’m there. I have bluetooth connectivity in my car – and listen to streaming music via my Verizon 6gb data plan.
After over 40 yrs in the music business I no longer store hard cd copies and don’t own a cd player … in fact my laptop and pads don’t come with cd/dvd players … and my smart tvs (four) have no dvd devices attached. On the occasion I do get a cd I rip it to my 3TB external HD from my desktop (aging at 5 yrs old) and toss the disc into the recycle pile. I have a 2TB JustCloud account as well… and a dropbox account.
It’s all about access kids 😉 j/s
What’s an iPod?
The headline should be “Apple Kills Off The Most Successful Wealth Transference Device”
Apple launched the iPod in October 2001. iTunes software which was the rebundeled SoundJam software, cataloged music files & was Mac Only . It was a simple matter to take illegally downloaded music files from the music pirate sites into iTunes, catalog them, and then onto you iPod. The access to all this free content drove the sales of the iPod and began the wealth transference from those involves in the music creation process to the Apple. How do we know this? iPod users clamored for larger and larger storage to store all the content, meanwhile sales of music began their massive downward trajectory. iPods continued to grow in capacity as music sales plummeted. Sales of the iPod saved Apple.