APPLE DISCONTINUES IPOD AFTER 20 YEARS, AVAILABLE ‘WHILE SUPPLIES LAST’

Apple has announced that it’s discontinuing the iPod Touch, and said that the product would be available ‘while supplies last.’

Confirming the announcement in a news post on Tuesday, the company said, “the spirit of iPod lives on” in all of its devices that play music, such as the iPhone, iPad, and HomePod Mini. The halt in sales of the last remaining model in Apple’s lineup of portable music players marks the end of an era.

First introduced 20 years ago, the original FireWire-equipped iPod model acted as just a portable music player, and Apple made models that were pretty much exclusively for listening to audio up until 2017, when it discontinued the iPod Nano and Shuffle.

While the iPod Touch has been embraced by some iPod enthusiasts as the new classic music player, it also found a following for those who wanted an iPhone-like experience but didn’t actually need a phone, reports The Verge.

Tony Fadell, one of the developers of the original iPod, mentioned in an interview with The Verge that the iPod team knew the iPhone could end up overtaking music players.

“It became very clear to us that there was a real threat from mobile phones, feature phones. They were starting to add music, MP3 playing, to the cell phones that they were shipping at the time,” he said.

The original iPod touch was released in 2007, the same year when the first iPhone had also released.

It has mostly the same hardware and software as the original iPhone, except for the calling features.

With Apple giving up on its iPod line, the tech giant is eager to direct its market audience toward its other products that offer music playback.

The halt in sales of the last remaining model in Apple’s lineup of portable music players marks the end of an era.