After the 21st anniversary of the iPod, Apple officially announced earlier today that its product line is being discontinued while supplies last and that there will be no new products in the line.
▲ Steve Jobs and the U2 Band. Photo from: New York Times
It's actually been a while since the last iPod was released, the seventh-generation iPod touch in 2019, and at $1,599 it was the most affordable iOS device at the time.
Compared to the first generation iPod, it also has upgraded built-in services to Apple Music, Apple News+, video, games, and other subscription services.
▲ Image from: New York Times
The iPod is no longer the pocket listening device that everyone wants, and it's becoming more of a cheap Apple content distribution platform in the shadow of the iPhone and iPad, and it's only logical that it's being discontinued.
After Apple's "The music lives on" message today, many people expressed their regret and said that the iPod has been an indelible part of their growth.
And going along with the theme of the music lives on, from Apple's perspective, it would be more like Apple Music lives on.
iPod+iTunes replaced by iPhone+Apple Music
The iPod is important to Apple, not just to the average consumer.
The advent of Apple's M1 homegrown chip had us shouting that Apple was that cool computer company again. And while in his time, Steve Jobs' return to Apple was the first to revitalize the iMac, it was really the iPod that brought Apple back from the dead and made it an integrated tech company.
There's no denying that Steve Jobs had extremely clever marketing skills, pulling the iPod out of his jeans pocket and convincing the world that the iPod didn't exist to play songs, but to change the way people discover and enjoy music.
With the iPod, Apple successfully opened the door to consumer electronics. In other words, the iPod transformed Apple from a computer company to a technology company.
▲ Image from: New York Times
The combination of iPod hardware with the iTunes service, which makes it easy to buy, download and listen to songs instead of buying physical CDs or burning them, has led to an unprecedented and convenient model of digital music consumption.
In 2013, iTunes sold a total of 25 billion songs, making it the world's largest music distribution platform, and Apple has amassed a huge number of paying subscribers through its bundling of 800 million credit cards.
This, in part, led to the creation of Apple Music and the eventual splitting of iTunes.
With the acquisition of Beats and the launch of Apple Lossless Audio, Apple Music, which was born out of iTunes, has grown to become the second largest streaming service in the world, behind Spotify, with some 524 million subscribers worldwide.
The iPod, too, has gradually expanded into four product lines: Classic, mini, Nano, and Shuffle.
If the iTunes service branched out into Apple Music and Apple TV, the iPod was the catalyst for the iPhone and Apple Watch, two products that have had a profound impact on the industry.
Back on the eve of the smartphone explosion, when many phone makers began introducing devices that could play music, many Apple executives feared that the iPod would be replaced.
▲ Core members of the iPhone team (from left to right: Phil Schiller, Tony Fadell, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall and Eddie Cue). Image from: Apple
To avoid this, Steve Jobs kicked off Project Purple, later the iPhone, and said 'if it's going to be replaced, then this should be done by Apple'.
Along the lines of the iPod, many thought the iPhone should be the iPod with a communication module added, but Jobs thought the smartphone was far from that, introducing multi-finger touch and Corning glass and ditching the stylus.
And continuing with the software and services within the iPod, people could back up and transfer data through iTunes, and eventually inspired the App Store, which allowed for the download and purchase of apps.
Apple shook up the traditional recording industry with one little brick, and it also catalyzed the iPhone, Apple Music, and other consumer electronics industry-changing products with that little brick.
In 2005, Apple had sold 22.5 million iPods, and its successor, the iPod touch, sold an impressive 6-8 million units per year.
But instead of lying on his laurels, Steve Jobs took the initiative and moved on to the iPod, which was eventually replaced by the iPhone and iTunes by Apple Music.
In a sense, the golden combination of iPod + iTunes for Apple listening hasn't gone away; it's become iPhone + Apple Music.
iPods are not the tears of the ages
But for the consumer electronics industry, these old products that were made obsolete by the times should have been sealed in the history books, not "lingering" iterations.
▲ iPod Max. in your dreams.
After the release of the iPhone, Talal Shamoon, CEO of Intertrust Technologies, a music digital rights management company that used to work with Apple, had said, "They showed the world that they had an atomic bomb, and a few years later they had a nuclear arsenal. After this, Apple will own the world."
While the release of the iPod certainly felt like an atomic bomb dropped on the traditional recording industry, the iPhone and the subsequent array of services (App Store, Apple Music) were the 'nuclear arsenal'.
Eventually, with an ecology made up of a range of hardware and services, it has a firm grip on a significant number of users.
Apple is also moving away from relying on pure hardware for revenue, with Apple's corresponding services revenue reaching $19.82 billion last quarter (2022Q2), more than all other hardware except for the iPhone, and a new high of 825 million users using Apple services.
Now, even with Apple Music's professional-grade features like lossless and spatial audio, the music player has been reduced to a niche product, making it difficult to acquire users with a single innovative feature, and no longer contributing to business growth.
▲ You can listen to Apple Music on your Android phone. Image from: iMore
In addition, Apple Music is also gradually moving away from the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other Apple hardware bundles and is geared towards Android and Windows platforms.
Unlike Apple, which adopted a barrier policy during its still-developing days, the Apple Music service, an electronics industry giant, is starting to be more inclusive, targeting more platforms and acquiring more potential users - after all, its own subscription system and robust library is a barrier in itself.
In fact, the iPod inevitably stopped after the release of the iPhone, when it was probably still a more affordable iOS device that served as a broad content distribution platform with a low barrier to entry.
Now, as the iPhone line expands, the price points covered by the product are crowding out the iPod. And services like Apple Music, which are gradually moving away from hardware bundles, have made it pointless to keep updating the iPod.
It's like Apple itself implies that it's Apple Music that lives on forever, and the iPod is sealed away in fond memories.