Apple has announced that it will discontinue production of the iPod Touch, the latest remaining model in its range of portable music players. In a news release Tuesday, the company said it would sell the current Touch “until supplies run out.”
Although Apple may end up producing special music players, the company says the “spirit of the iPod lives on” in all its music-playing devices, such as the iPhone, iPad and HomePod Mini.
The release of the iPod Touch marks the end of an era. As Apple notes, it introduced the first iPod “more than 20 years ago.” The original model, equipped with FireWire, acted only as a portable music player, and Apple made models that were almost exclusively for listening to audio until 2017, when the iPod Nano and Shuffle stopped. While the iPod Touch was seen by some iPod enthusiasts as a new classic music player, it also found followers for those who wanted an experience like the iPhone but didn’t really need a phone.
While the iPod Touch has its fans, the inscription has been on the wall for some time. The model was discontinued on Tuesday, the seventh-generation iPod Touch was introduced in 2019, along with the iPhone 7. The sixth-generation model launched in 2015. Although people like me cried for a simplified music player created for the streaming era, it it was clear that Apple didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the iPod.
It is difficult to blame the company for this. Most people are not particularly interested in wearing a second device, which does something that their smartphone is fully capable of (see also: the drying of the market for cameras for aiming and shooting). Tony Fadel, one of the developers of the original iPod, mentioned in an interview with The Verge that the iPod team knew that the iPhone could eventually overtake the music players. “It has become very clear to us that there is a real threat from mobile phones, phones with functions. “They started adding music, MP3 playback, to the cell phones they were delivering at the time,” he said.
Apple did not see this as a problem, according to Fadell. “At Apple, every single thing that was tested – at least with Steve – had to be sent because it was existential. You can’t help but make the iPhone successful because you’re cannibalizing the iPod business.
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