All attention was on Apple yesterday as they unveiled their latest line of gadgets with two new iPhones and a watch.
But amidst the pomp and ceremony and glittery new things, Apple’s assassins quietly killed one of their longest, and most iconic gadgets, and nobody noticed.
There was no announcement, but when Apple reopened its online store yesterday following their keynote fans found the iPod classic is now conspicuously absent from the iPod section.
Yes, Apple’s oldest living media player has been put out to pasture, and it’s taking the iconic click wheel with it.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising, with the rise of music streaming services such as Spotify, and the overall decline in recorded music sales around the world. In fact, sales of the iPod have been declining for years
Apple’s iPod was not an instant sensation when first launched in 2001, but by 2004 it was a household name and played a large part in creating the boom in the modern digital music market.
Many loved the iPod Classic because of it’s large storage capacity of 160GB, allowing you to carry as many as 40,000 songs in your pocket.
The remaining options include the shuffle, nano and touch at the high end, with the max amount of storage being 64GB.
Though no one realised at the time, Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, during his keynote paid tribute to the icon which helped revive the company’s fortunes and grew them to one of the most valuable companies in the world.
“It turns out, with every revolutionary product that Apple has created, a breakthrough in user-interface was required,” Cook said. “With the Mac, we introduced the mouse. The click-wheel on the iPod. And with iPhone, multi-touch gave us the ability to interact with a beautiful canvas of photos or video or music.”
The death of the iPod Classic is symbolic as it demonstrates the way people have changed the way they consume music, preferring to access music over the cloud from any device rather than store them all on a dedicated music player.
After all, streaming is a phenomenon that now contributes $1 billion in combined revenue to the music industry, while the enormous sales figures of Mumford & Sons’ sophomore album, Babel provides an interesting case study into whether streaming services are helping album sales rather than cannibalising them.
But die hard music fans can still get their dedicated music player fix, with a number of new entrants eyeing off the iPod crown, including Neil Young’s Pono.
