Oct 7, 2009 0
Where’s the love for the iPod Classic?
An email from Apple just hit my inbox. I decided to read this one (I get a lot emails from Apple). It’s an info ad about the new lineup of iPods. If you signed up for anything from Apple, then I’m sure you got this email. I would post it up on here, but I’m sure that violates some kind of copyright law. Anyway, the ad focuses on the upcoming iPod lineup. There’s only one thing that’s missing:
The iPod Classic. Seriously. Where’s the love Apple?
I’ve read countless reports and articles over the past year related to the direction in which Apple is heading with the iPod market. Most tech pundits agree: the iPod Classic is quickly approaching its demise. If Apple still carries the iPod Classic, then it doesn’t make sense to exclude it from the promotion and marketing material for the Classic, unless they are trying to get rid of it.
With flash memory becoming less and less expensive and their chips becoming smaller and smaller, there’s plenty of opportunity to simply offer iPods that have large flash-based storage capacities. Flash-based storage works better for music players for a few obvious reasons. The first of which is its resistance to physical movement. A hard drive-based iPod is susceptible to abuse and damage because of the spinning platter. But flash memory is movement-friendly and perfect for things like exercising. Another benefit to flash memory over hard disks is power consumption. Power efficiency is much better on flash-based devices rather than hard disk-based.
Despite the obvious phase-out, I don’t understand why Apple can’t continue to tout the original design as long as they are continuing to produce more units. I owned an iPod Classic for almost a year; then it was stolen. And I mourned its loss. Seriously. There’s still a significant market out there for people with big music libraries who need a device with enough capacity to fit everything.
In the end, I am sure that Apple will replace the Classic with large-capacity iPod Nano and iPod Touch units (or even a new class of iPod all-together).
iPod Classic, even though our time together is drawing to a close, we still love you.
Kyle
