Apple Ends Production Of iPod After More Than 2 Decades

The iPod is now enjoying its swan tune for Apple.

After almost 21 years, Apple introduced it’s ending manufacturing of the iPod Contact on Tuesday. The mannequin was the final iPod in manufacturing for the corporate, which started to provide the MP3 participant in 2001.

The final iPod mannequin will proceed to be offered “whereas provides final,” the corporate stated.

The iPod “redefined” music discovery, in line with Apple Vice President Greg Joswiak, and its music-listening characteristic now “lives on” throughout different Apple merchandise such because the iPhone.

The corporate offered over 54 million iPods in 2008, its peak gross sales yr for the product, in line with Apple gross sales knowledge tracked by statistics website Statista. Its gross sales made up roughly 40% of Apple’s income in 2006.

In 2001, Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs first launched the $400 iPod ― since dubbed the iPod Traditional ― that featured a click-based wheel to pick from 5GB of MP3 information.

“What number of occasions have you ever gone on the street with a CD participant and stated, ‘Oh, God―I didn’t deliver the CD I needed to,’” Jobs stated on the announcement.

“ … The good factor about iPod is that your complete library suits in your pocket,” he added.

The corporate ended manufacturing of the iPod Traditional in 2014.

Apple additionally cycled via different iPod fashions all through the years, together with an iPod Nano with a video digicam, the clip-on iPod Shuffle and the iPod Contact.

The seventh-generation iPod Contact, launched in 2019, proved to be the top of the street for the product. The mannequin’s most storage capability was over 50 occasions the quantity of the unique iPod. Its 32GB mannequin is offered for $199, half the price of the 2001 iPod.

Tuesday’s announcement made various iPhone followers memorialize their outdated gadgets.