After the grand reveal of the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch at Apple's much hyped press conference yesterday, the company has silently removed the original iPod Classic from its iPod product page lineup. Now we are left with just the iPod touch, iPod nano and iPod shuffle to appeal to the shrinking dedicated MP3 player market.
The Click-Wheel controlled music player debuted in 2007 and evolved with some slimming down, click wheel tweaks and aesthetic changes implemented from around 2009. It has been a stolid member of Apple's music player product lineup while other products gradually moved to touchscreen interfaces and iOS. Apple continued to sell it in silver and black, its larger chassis meant that the company was able to push the device as its most voluminous music player, with 160GB of internal storage on a spinning hard drive. The most capacious iPod model now available comes with just 64GB of storage for your music and videos.
Over the years, the iPod Classic has generated a good amount of income for Apple. In 2009, at the peak of the MP3 player's popularity, 54.83 million iPod units shipped with the Classic accounting for a large chunk of that number, reports CNet. It introduced many consumers to the company's hardware and software products and the iTunes store. However Apple's iPhone (and rival smartphone) releases quickly cannibalised the casual MP3 playing market, thus iPod sales declined sharply.
Did you own an old Apple iPod Classic? Please share your thoughts upon the demise of the Classic range.
U2 album free on iTunes
After performing at the iPhone launch event yesterday, rock band U2 announced that they are giving away their new album for free. Over half a billion iTunes customers will get the album free, it's said to be the largest album release in history.
Songs Of Innocence will be freely downloadable by iTunes customers in 119 countries before going on general release on 13 October.
