IPod Classic (sixth gen)

We didn’t know it at the time, but the sixth iPod, the 2007 iPod Classic, was the last of the line. The iPod name would live on, but that iconic design wouldn’t. The Classic dispensed with the famous white casing and seven years later Apple would dispense with the Classic too. There would be no more scroll wheels, touch wheels or click wheels, no more hard disks, no more 30-pin dock connectors – and no more iPods whose sole purpose was music. Today’s iPods are computers with music apps. And that’s great. But while there were half-hearted attempts to add photos and videos to it, the iPod Classic was only ever destined to be a music machine.

The news that Apple was killing off the Classic in September 2014 turned out to be bittersweet. People with really big music collections were sad because, at 160GB, no other iPod came close to the biggest Classic’s storage space. But Classic owners who didn’t really care about such things soon discovered that people with really big record collections were willing to pay big money for big hard-disks. iPod Classic prices soared, and while they’ve calmed down a bit you can still make around £400 from one.

The iPod Classic didn’t die because it was a bad product. It died because Apple couldn’t make it any more. The world had moved on: the hard disks were impossible to source, and even if Apple had managed to get enough there wasn’t enough interest in the iPod to justify the costs of developing a Lightning one.

I thought of putting my 80GB black one on eBay, but decided no: I like it too much, and it’s been the core of my in-car entertainment for years. The battery’s probably long gone but I keep mine cabled up to the car stereo anyway, so that my impressive collection of Girls Aloud and Five Star records is always available when I’m out and about.