Hey, remember when the iPod was hip and with it? When Apple introduced a product based on the idea that people don’t particularly feel like swapping in compact flash cards into a $5 piece of junk with a headphone port? Boy, it was sure influential, wasn’t it?
Not anymore. In fact, Apple may be killing the iPod classic before the year is out.
It’s not hard to see why. Sure, iPods still sell. They still sell a lot, actually — about ten million every quarter, meaning Apple pulls in a billion dollars of revenue from a music player they stopped caring about once the iPhone came along. On the other hand, that stops sounding so awesome when you realize that the iPod Touch sells a lot more. Also, a lot of people at this point have more MP3s than the iPod has storage space, and now that music lockers like Amazon Cloud Player are on firm legal ground, carting around 160GB of storage seems a bit excessive.
Also on the chopping block: the Shuffle. Not that this is terribly surprising, since Apple never really cared about its “budget” line (does anybody even remember the Mac Mini?). Apple seems to feel the Nano can fill in for all the joggers and gym rats who need a tiny iPod. But we’re sure this will be greeting with much wailing and gnashing of the teeth by people, at least until they remember they can get an iPhone on a network that doesn’t suck.