Apple discontinues the iPod after 20 years

Apple has announced that it will discontinue the iPod Touch, the last remaining model in its line of portable music players. On Tuesday, in a news post, Apple confirmed it will sell the current Touch "while supplies last."

While Apple may be done with making dedicated music players, the company says "the spirit of the iPod lives on" in all of its music-playing devices, like the iPhone, iPad and HomePod Mini.

The demise of the iPod Touch marks the end of an era. It introduced the first iPod "more than 20 years ago, as Apple points out." The original FireWire-equipped model acted only as a portable music player. Apple made almost exclusively models for listening to audio until 2017 when it discontinued the iPod Nano and Shuffle. While some iPod enthusiasts have embraced the iPod Touch as the new classic music player, it also found a following for those who wanted an iPhone-like experience but didn't need a phone.

While the iPod Touch has had its fans, the writing has been on the wall for a while. The seventh-generation iPod Touch that Apple discontinued on Tuesday was introduced in 2019 via a press release. While the iPhone 11 would be released later that year, the 2019 touch had the same A10 processor as the iPhone 7. The sixth-generation iPod Touch was released in 2015. Even though people like me carrying for a music player Simple designed for the broadcast age. However, the time between releases and older hardware made it clear that Apple wasn't looking to spend much time with the iPod.

It's hard to blame the company for that. Most people aren't particularly interested in carrying around a second device that does something their smartphone is perfectly capable of (see also: depletion of the point-and-shoot camera market).