After more than two decades, Apple has decided to ditch the iPod.
Apple announced it would keep selling the Touch, the only iPod model still available, “while supplies last.”
The iPod was the first MP3 device to hold 1,000 songs when it debuted in 2001. Aside from the Touch, the iPod mini, iPod Nano, and iPod Shuffle were also available. By 2011, Apple had a 70% global market share in MP3 players, and more than 400 million iPods had been sold. Given the prominence of the iPhone and other devices that can be used to listen to music, industry insiders had long projected that Touch will follow the Nano and Shuffle, the company’s last standalone music players, in 2017.
Later Touch models allowed users to capture images, send emails, and make video calls, essentially making them seem like a modified iPhone without cellular access.
In a statement announcing the discontinuation, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, said the “spirit of iPod lives on”.
“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impacted more than just the music industry – it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to and shared,” he said.
