Apple has stopped selling its 12-year-old music players, the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. The company updated its iPod lineup on Thursday and discontinued the two music players leaving iPod Touch as the only device in its iPod series.
The iPod Nano and Shuffle were released back in 2005 as an affordable and smaller alternative to Apple’s standard iPod. The Cupertino based tech giant had already stopped updating the Nano and Shuffle several years ago. Now they are being killed in the era when most people store and stream music on their smartphones.
However, the iPod product line still remains alive with iPod Touch. Apple plans to continue selling its Wi-Fi enabled, iOS-based all-purpose phablet with doubling the storage capacity and slashing the price.
For the iPod Touch, Apple doubled the storage capacity of its top line model to 128 GB. This version costs $299. Another iPod Touch with 32GB of storage sells for $199. The current iPod touch is the sixth-generation model, released on July 15, 2015.
Apple announced the seventh and final generation iPod Nano on September 12, 2012. And the last fourth generation of iPod Shuffle was introduced on September 1, 2010. Now, the iPod Shuffle and Nano have been removed from Apple’s website and online store.
The company has long anticipated that iPods would gradually fade away while launching the first iPhone. These days people buy iPhones or other smartphones capable of playing and streaming music online, iPod lost its charm.
Another reason these devices are out of the league now is that they don’t support Bluetooth, so they cannot be connected with Apple’s latest wireless headphones. They also don’t support Apple Music, the online music streaming service of the company.
To recall, the sales of iPods was at its heights in 2008 when the devices generated whopping revenue of $9.2 billion for the company. While on the other hand, the then-launched iPhone accounted for $1.8 billion only in that same fiscal year.
However, the sales of iPods have recently dropped so much that Apple doesn’t even count the devices in its financial statements. Last year, the iPhone alone generated a revenue of nearly $136 billion.
