Apple has announced the discontinuation of the iPod Touch, the only remaining device in its portable music player portfolio.
While Apple has discontinued dedicated music players, the firm claims that “the spirit of the iPod lives on” in all of its music-playing devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and Home Pod Mini.
The demise of the iPod Touch signifies the end of an era. According to Apple, the first iPod was released “almost 20 years ago.”
The first FireWire-equipped model was only a portable music player, and Apple made variants that were almost entirely for listening to audio until 2017, when the iPod Nano and Shuffle were retired.
While some iPod devotees embraced the iPod Touch as the new classic music player, it also acquired a following among others who desired an iPhone-like experience but did not require a phone.
While the iPod Touch has its devotees, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time. The seventh-generation iPod Touch, which Apple discontinued on Tuesday, was announced in a press release in 2019.
The sixth-generation iPod Touch was released in 2015.
Despite the fact that people like me cried out for a simple music player designed for the age of streaming, the delay between releases and ageing hardware made it plain that Apple wasn’t interested in spending much effort on the iPod.
It’s difficult to blame the firm for this. Most consumers aren’t interested in carrying a second gadget that accomplishes something their smartphone can do quite well.
In an interview with The Verge, Tony Fadell, one of the original iPod’s creators, stated that the iPod team was aware that the iPhone will eventually overtake music players.
“It became quite evident to us that mobile phones, feature phones, posed a significant threat.” “At the time, they were starting to integrate music, MP3 playback, to the cell phones that they were distributing,” he explained.
According to Fadell, Apple did not view this as a concern.
“Everything that was tried at Apple, at least under Steve, had to ship because it was existential.”
You couldn’t make the iPhone successful if you were destroying the iPod company.”
We’ll probably see more iPod modification projects from hobbyists, as well as web experiences aimed to inspire nostalgia for the era of dedicated music players. Apple did not develop the market for them, but it did catapult them to prominence; today, the torch has been given to firms like Sony and Fiio to keep the legacy alive for die-hard music fans.
To read our blog on “We have some high expectations for Apple’s iPhone 14,” click here