Apple’s online store went down today as a part of Apple’s big press event, and when it came up it gained a few new products. But eagle-eyed music fans noticed that there was also something missing: the venerable iPod Classic.
That’s right, Apple’s only hard drive-based portable music player has finally been sent to the great big product farm in the sky, after several years of not receiving a product update. Its claim to fame was its massive storage capacity: Apple’s flash-based iPod line tops out at 64 GB of storage, while the iPod classic had a 160 GB hard drive.
Of course, it also had some hefty drawbacks: it couldn’t connect to the Internet, and syncing new music required users to connect it to their computer with one of Apple’s 30-pin cables. With the rise of smartphones, fewer people need a dedicated music player, especially one as heavy and bulky as the iPod Classic.
Everyone knew this day was coming, but the departure of the iPod Classic means that Apple’s iconic click wheel design has disappeared from the iPod line, and probably won’t be coming back. Interestingly, the iPod’s design lives on as the icon for the iPod tab on Apple’s online store.
The timing seems connected to the launch of the iPhone 6. Apple doubled the top-end phone’s storage capabilities, which means that people who can settle for 128 GB of music storage can now pick up an iPhone that sports that amount.
With iTunes Match, people can also pay Apple $25 a year to sync their music with the could so that it’s available to stream anywhere they have an internet connection without requiring that it take up space on a device’s memory.
So farewell, iPod Classic. Your bulky presence will be hardly missed in the world of music players.
