Will Apple kill the iPod?

Simon Jary hopes the end isn’t nigh for the iPod

It’s not a claim as great as Douglas Adams being 
the first owner of an Apple Macintosh in the UK 
(Stephen Fry was the second), but I might have 
been the first non-Apple employee to own an iPod 
in the UK. 
It just so happened that I was sitting next to the 
Apple PR when he handed out boxes of the brand new 
MP3 player on UK launch day back in 2001.
I remember that I was first to unbox it – we didn’t 
video such things in those days – and switch it on 
because everyone else in the room was still eating 
their breakfast. I’d already eaten. On such tiny 
details is history made.
Since then I’ve owned a bunch of the iconic 

portable music players – updating either to review 
them for Macworld or bought them as my iTunes
library outgrew the old one.
I owned the original 5GB iPod (2001), the 20GB
second-generation iPod (2002), the weird iPod with
the silly buttons (2003), the 60GB iPod Photo (2004),
the fi rst iPod shu e (2005), the fifth-generation
80GB iPod (2005), the clip-on iPod shu ffle (2006),
and the 160GB iPod classic (2007).
That last one is still going, making it my mostused
Apple product of all time – with the possible
exception of one of those Apple logo stickers that I
stuck on a door in 1994.
I didn’t like the look of the super-popular iPod
mini (both girly and awkward), and despite its waiflike
 looks I never bought an iPod nano (looked
like it might snap). I didn’t bother with the iPod
touch for a few reasons. Indeed I have something
of an irrational disliking of the touch. Here’s a few

reasons why I’ve avoided it.

Why the iPod touch is no classic

1.It’s too expensive. The current 64GB touch costs

£329. The 160GB classic is £199.
2.Its maximum capacity for ages
was 32GB and still only o ffers the
same storage as the iPod I owned
a decade ago. The 160GB iPod
classic can hold, according to
Apple, 40,000 tracks. Check your
iTunes. That’s a lot. And you can
stu the classic full of movies and
TV shows, plus your photos, too.
3.I already own an iPhone
4.It’s not really an iPod. It’s an iPhone that can’t make
phone calls. A cheap knock, I know, but a true one.
5.You get to the music much faster on a classic than
on a touch. The iPod is ready as soon as you switch
it on. On a touch music is just another app.
6.You don’t have to turn the iPod classic sideways
to browse Cover Flow.
7.The classic doesn’t annoy you with notifications.
8.The iPod is smaller than an iPhone or touch
and can just about hold all my music.
9.The battery life is great – despite powering an
actual moving hard drive it lasts longer than the
fl ashy SSD in an iPhone. There’s no point in creating
a battery case for an iPod. Apple’s tech specs
suggest the iPod touch has better battery life but
that’s only if you promise to not touch another app,
and switch o Wi-Fi, and so on.
10.It fits all my speakers at home. If I moved my
music to an iPhone I’d have to buy two Lightning
adapters, which together would cost me more than
the price of a new iPod shu ffle.
11.Okay, it’s in a case that’s fraying at the edges
but the iPod classic is so old it’s kind of retro. Yes, it
could stop working at any time – at seven years old
it’s surely on borrowed time.
12.It’s outlived about six pairs of headphones. Not
Apple earbuds – proper headphones.
Out of all the iPods I’ve owned the current classic
is one of the best designs – the original is hard to
beat, though, for true iconic and tech-ironic status
points. But for years pundits have been predicting
the demise of the iPod proper – mainly because of
the stupid iPod touch.

Why Apple might kill the iPod

1.To show it’s still innovative and young at heart
Apple must sacrifi ce its old in a Logans Run
demonstration of tech virility.
2.The iPod accounted for less than two percent of
Apple’s total revenue for the past quarter, down from
four percent the year before. That, friends, is known
in business as a trend.
3. For the first time in more than a decade, the
iPod’s revenue was less than billion. Apple counts
in billions, not millions.
4.Apple CEO Tim Cook calls the iPod “a declining
business”. That is not a ringing endorsement from
the man who makes the decisions.
5.Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer thinks that
decline will continue: “We would expect [iPod sales]
to continue to decline year-over-year in the March
quarter”. That trend thing again – not from an
analyst, from the numbers guy at Apple.
6.Apple hasn’t updated the iPod classic since
2009, and Jony I've probably raised only his
eyebrow during that rejig.
7.The iPod classic still uses Apple’s old 30-pin connector.
 Anything without Lightning or
a Thunderbolt connection has one foot in the
Cupertino municipal graveyard.
8.Everyone is streaming their music via services
such as Spotify. Let Spotify store all the music and
just download what you need when you need it.
9.Apple likes to keep a lean product matrix.
10.Even Samsung hasn’t bothered to copy it.

Why Apple won’t kill the iPod

What gives me hope about
the at least medium-term
survival chances of the
iPod in Apple’s line up
of stellar products?
1.The iPod is still the second product family in the
Apple website’s top tabs, right next to the Mac and
before the iPhone or iPad. That’s signifi cant surely,
unless Apple has a satanic reverse alphabetical
product line-up strategy. Remember, though, that
this is the company that sold its first product for
2.The iPod range still generates massive revenues
– £587m in the last quarter. That’s close to billion a
year. That should pay for a few windows in the new
corporate spaceship.
3.Apple sold six million iPods from October
December 2013, with an average price of – which
suggests the pricier models are more popular than
the cheapo shu ffle. Apple hasn’t broken down the
numbers to separate the classic and the touch, mind.
4.The iPod saved Apple. Forget the kooky Bondi
Blue iMac. The iMac enabled Apple to limp on until it
discovered its next game changer and that was the
iPod – from which came the iPhone, which took the
rescued company and propelled it into the big time.
5.Apple has plenty of cash. It’s not looking at cutting
costs right now, as far as we can tell.
6.Streaming services such as Spotify rely on large
Internet data downloads – no good when you’re
on holiday without limitless Wi-Fi. Music stored
locally on your iPod wins every time.
7.Lossless. If you want the highest-quality
music you need an enormous storage capacity.
Only the iPod classic will do.
8.Apple didn’t do much with the Mac Pro – The
Mac That Time Forgot – for even longer. For an
entire decade Apple left the Pro in e ectively
the same case, tinkering with the processor and
storage, and every now and then switching the
FireWire around. Then out of the blue we get a new
Mac Pro that no one else but a Cube-era Apple
could have dreamed up. Apple’s been even lazier
with the iPod classic but who knows what it has up
its sleeve? See: Latest Apple rumours
9.Tim Cook hasn’t yet mercilessly killed o a
product line. Steve Jobs used to relish such murder.
Has Tim got it in him to strike down the iPod? Has
anyone called Tim ever been nasty?
10.Pop stars won’t bother turning up at Apple
product launches any more. What will they be left to
entertain the media with – jugglers and dwarves?
If Apple is mad enough to ditch the iPod, I only
hope that it gives us all a chance to update our
music players to the latest model, and not just
suddenly stop selling it.

I expect new, boxed iPod classics to jump in value
when Apple pulls the plug on the non-Flash players
– with diehards like me resisting the pricier iPod
touch and its feeble capacity. Even if Apple releases
a 160GB iPod touch, imagine the cost!
The iPod classic is well named. It carries
more music at a higher quality. It doesn’t do much
else – ever played one of the iPod games? – so
you can listen to music properly and not do so
while playing Ninja Fruit or tapping in Facebook
updates. It’s cheaper than the iPhone that can’t
phone – and 19.9mm shorter.
I’m not a Newton nut who thinks the MessagePad
is better than the iPad, or even an idiot who’s
sticking with iOS 6 because of the new font.
I will gladly switch to something that’s a
di fferent shape, does other things, and is called
something else even if it’s not made by Apple –
as long as it has a larger capacity than 160GB,
works just as well, looks as good, and costs under
£200. And is made by Apple.
But I’d rather that was a new iPod.