Apple has officially discontinued the iPod more than 20 years after it was launched, due to the fact that its other devices have melded music into their functionality.
The iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and HomePod mini all duplicate the iPod’s music streaming abilities, the company noted. The most recent iteration of the music player, the iPod Touch, has not been updated since 2019, and many of its features are now available on other products.
Apple said it would continue to sell the Touch, the only generation of the iPod still on sale, “while supplies last”.
The iPod was released in 2001, and was the first MP3 player capable of storing 1,000 songs. Aside from the Touch, versions included the iPod mini, iPod Nano, and iPod Shuffle.
By 2011, Apple held a 70% global market share in MP3 players, and to date more than 400m iPods have been sold.
The company stopped selling the Nano and Shuffle, its last standalone music players, in 2017, and industry experts had long predicted the Touch would follow given the prevalence of the iPhone and other smartphones that can be used to listen to music.
Later versions of the Touch increasingly resembled smartphones, allowing users to take photos, send emails and make video calls.
In a statement announcing the discontinuation, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, said the “spirit of iPod lives on”.
“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impacted more than just the music industry — it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” said Joswiak.
“Today, the spirit of iPod lives on. We’ve integrated an incredible music experience across all of our products, from the iPhone to the Apple Watch to HomePod mini, and across Mac, iPad, and Apple TV.
And Apple Music delivers industry-leading sound quality with support for spatial audio — there’s no better way to enjoy, discover, and experience music.”
Introduced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2001, the device also helped remake Apple by expanding the company’s product line beyond computers. Six years later, Jobs introduced the iPhone, which he described as “like having your life in your pocket.”
