Apple Stops Production of iPods, After Nearly 22 Years (original) (raw)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/technology/apple-ipod-phasing-out.html

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Farewell to the iPod

After nearly 22 years, Apple is stopping production of the devices that changed consumer electronics and led to the creation of the iPhone.

The early iPod could hold up to 1,000 songs, a breakthrough amount at the time.Credit...Apple, via Getty Images

Tripp Mickle

Tripp Mickle has covered Apple for seven years and has written extensively about how the company creates its products.

May 10, 2022

The iPod began with a modest goal: Let’s create a music product that makes people want to buy more Macintosh computers. Within a few years, it would change consumer electronics and the music industry and lead to Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world.

First arriving in October 2001, the pocket-size rectangle with a white face and polished steel frame weighed 6.5 ounces. It came packaged with white earbuds in a custom color, moon gray, and held 1,000 songs.

It exploded in popularity in the years that followed, creating what became known as the iPod generation. Throughout much of the 2000s, people wandered the world, headphones dangling from their ears. The iPod was ubiquitous.

On Tuesday, Apple officially said goodbye to all that. The company announced it had phased out production of its iPod Touch, bringing an end to a two-decade run of a product line that inspired the creation of the iPhone and helped turn Silicon Valley into the epicenter of global capitalism.

Since introducing the iPod in 2001, Apple has sold an estimated 450 million of them, according to Loup Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in tech research. Last year it sold an estimated three million iPods, a fraction of the estimated 250 million iPhones it sold.

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