Apple discontinues the iPod after 20 years

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

The iPod Touch is the last model in Apple's portable music players. The company said in a news post that it will sell the current Touch while supplies last.

The spirit of iPod lives on in all of Apple's devices that play music, such as the iPhone, iPad, and HomePod Mini.

The end of an era is marked by the departure of the iPod Touch. The first iPod was introduced over 20 years ago, and Apple made models that were only for listening to audio up until last year. While the iPod Touch has been embraced by some iPod enthusiasts as the new classic music player, it also found a following for those who wanted an iPhone-like experience but didn't actually need a phone.

The writing has been on the wall for a while. The seventh-gen iPod Touch was introduced in 2019. The sixth-gen model was launched in 2015. Despite people like me crying for a simplistic music player designed for the age of streaming, it was clear that Apple wasn't looking to spend much time on the iPod.

It is hard to blame the company for that. Most people aren't interested in carrying a second device that does something their phone is capable of. Tony Fadell, one of the developers of the original iPod, said in an interview that the iPod team knew that the iPhone could overtake music players. He said that they were adding music to the cell phones that they were shipping at the time.

According to Fadell, Apple didn't see that as a problem. You couldn't make the iPhone successful if you were competing with the iPod business.

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