Who’s for a new iPod ?
Could this year’s Touch turn out to be the end of the line for the music device that changed the world?
IF YOU’D told the man in the street 10 years ago that by now the then ubiquitous iPod would be almost obsolete, he probably wouldn’t have heard you – he’d have been listening to one of the “thousand songs in his pocket”.
Everybody had an iPod at one time, didn’t they?
The white wires were the giveaway, and it seemed like they were everywhere.
It’s a staggering 18 years since Apple released the first iPod – a magical white box that gave unparalleled usability and portability to your music collection.
Looking at it now, it seems a little clunky and thick – and even at the time the reviewers were less than impressed.
But it turned out that Apple had hit upon a winner unprecedented in its history. The Mac never sold like the iPod did.
By 2001, Apple had re-found its feet following some very rocky
moments financially in the Nineties. The iPod really laid the foundations on which the biggest company in the world is now built.
Of course, it’s all about the iPhone for Apple these days, so it seems a little strange, then, that this month saw the first new iPod to come out of Cupertino for almost four years.
Could it be the last? If it is, it will be the end of an era – not just for Apple, but for the music industry and music-lovers everywhere.
There’s no measuring just how much this pocket box of music has changed things.
Of course, ever since the iPod gained the large screen of the iPhone, it has been so much more than a music machine – you can play games on it (iOS is the largest gaming platform across the globe), read books on it, take photos with it, and do any of the million other things you can do with an iPhone and the gazillion apps in the App Store.
But the question remains – why a new iPod? Doesn’t everybody have iPhones these days?
Well, the answer might be in the price – the new iPod starts at £199. Compare that to the entry-level iPhone, which at the moment is the iPhone 7 – starting at £449.
So if you’re using it for music, games, photos, watching videos, reading… the kind of things that don’t require alwaysconnected access to the internet, you will be on to a winner.
The comparison with the iPhone 7 is only partially fair, though. The new iPod Touch does run on the same chip as the 7 (the A10 Fusion), but that’s pretty much where the feature-parity ends.
The phone has a better camera (12MP and 4K video as opposed to 8MP and 1080p on the iPod), and a bigger screen (4.7in to 4in).
The latter feature might actually be a selling point – I know a lot of people who long for the days when the iPhone was a lot smaller than today’s models, and when connected to WiFi, you could feasibly use the iPod as a phone using the FaceTime app.
Anyway, in reality I don’t expect Apple thinks it’s going to sell a lot of these to consumers. I know they are popular with businesses in point-of-sale and stock control scenarios. That said, it’s nice to know Apple still has some love for the device that really started the rise to the top for them.
Even if it does turn out to be the last of its kind, its legacy lives on in the devices it paved the way for and the company it helped to build.
■ You can find out for about the new iPod at apple.com/uk/