Goodbye, friend: Apple discontinues the iPod

Apple has announced that it is killing the iPod. Technically the company is not going to take back the devices from the wild, but no newer models will be announced or launched. The era of the iPods is over, after 20 years.

October 2021 marked 20 years of the iPod and essentially over time, despite becoming pretty much redundant, the iPod had managed to still stick around. And now that’s over.

The first iPod was launched with the iconic click wheel model and was discontinued in 2014. Steve Jobs was the one to introduce it. “With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go. With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again,” Jobs had said.

Then came the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Nano that were also killed off three years later. The last of the lot, the seventh iteration, the iPod Touch, is still around after making its debut three years ago. You can still buy it, it is available, but only till stocks last.

Understandably, most people will not miss the iPod at all. But there are some that will.

“Today, the experience of taking one’s music library out into the world has been integrated across Apple’s product line — from iPhone and Apple Watch to iPad and Mac — along with access to more than 90 million songs and over 30,000 playlists available via Apple Music,” Apple pointed out in its announcement.

“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impact more than just the music industry — it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

“Today, the spirit of iPod lives on. We’ve integrated an incredible music experience across all of our products, from the iPhone to the Apple Watch to HomePod mini, and across Mac, iPad, and Apple TV. And Apple Music delivers industry-leading sound quality with support for spatial audio — there’s no better way to enjoy, discover, and experience music,” Joswiak added.

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