Apple has announced that it will discontinue the iPod Touch, the last remaining model in its line of portable music players. in a news post on tuesdaythe company says it will sell current tap “While reservations last.”
While Apple may be done with making dedicated music players, the company says “the spirit of the iPod lives on” in all of its music-playing devices, like the iPhone, iPad and HomePod Mini.
The demise of the iPod Touch marks the end of an era. As Apple points out, it introduced the first iPod “more than 20 years ago.” The original FireWire-equipped model acted simply as a portable music player, and Apple made models that were almost exclusively for listening to audio until 2017, when discontinued iPod Nano and Shuffle. While the iPod Touch has been adopted by some iPod enthusiasts as the new classical music playerit also found a following for those who wanted an iPhone-like experience but didn’t really need a phone.
While the iPod Touch has had its fans, the writing has been on the wall for a while. The seventh-generation iPod Touch that Apple discontinued on Tuesday was introduced in 2019 through a press release. While the iPhone 11 would be be released later that yearthe 2019 touch had the same A10 processor like iPhone 7. The sixth generation iPod Touch was released in 2015. Despite people like me Crying for a simplistic music player designed for the streaming age, the time between releases and aging hardware made it clear that Apple wasn’t looking to spend much time on the iPod.
It’s hard to blame the company for that. Most people aren’t particularly interested in carrying around a second device that does something their smartphone is perfectly capable of (see also: depletion of the point-and-shoot camera market). Tony Fadell, one of the developers of the original iPod, mentioned in an interview with the edge that the iPod team knew that the iPhone could eventually overtake music players. “It became very clear to us that there was a real threat from mobile phones, basic phones. They were starting to add music, MP3 playback, to the cell phones they were shipping at the time,” he said.
Apple didn’t see that as a problem, according to Fadell. “At Apple, everything that was attempted, at least with Steve, needed to be shipped because it was existential. You couldn’t stop making the iPhone successful because you were cannibalizing the iPod business.”
While the iPod may soon disappear from store shelves, it’s hard to completely remove something so iconic. We are likely to continue to see iPod Modification Projects of enthusiasts or web experiences designed to evoke nostalgia for the era of dedicated music players. Apple didn’t invent the market for them, but it rocketed them to popularity; now, the torch has passed to companies like Sony Y fiio to keep the legacy of hardcore music enthusiasts alive.
Correction, May 10 at 1:49 pm ET: The original version of this article said that the seventh-generation iPod Touch was released alongside the iPhone 7. It has the same chip as the iPhone 7, but was released about three years later. We are sorry for the mistake.