End of an Era: Apple Discontinues iPod After 21 Years

Apple’s iPod, a ground-breaking device that completely changed the music and electronics industries more than two decades ago, is no more.

The company announced recently that it would discontinue the iPod Touch, which is the last remaining model of a product line that first went on sale in October 2001. The touch-screen model, launched in 2007, will remain in sale until supplies run out. Introduced by Steve Jobs, the iPod was credited with helping to turn Apple from a nearly bankrupt company to an eventual $3-trillion tech giant. The iPod set the stage for the development of the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods.

When the first iPod was launched on October 23, 2001, it could store nearly 1000 tracks and was designed by the same team that later invented the iPhone. Today there are more than 90 million songs on Apple’s streaming service. There have been various iPod models over the years – including the Shuffle and Nano – but the iPod Touch, released in 2007 is the last model to be discontinued.

“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did, impacted more than just the music industry – it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared”, said Greg Joswiak, the senior vice-president of worldwide marketing at Apple.

Although the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player on the market, that unique Apple design proved to be the push that the digital music needed to begin to tempt people away from cassette and CD players (and file sharing). At the time when the iPod was launched, the music industry was fighting for survival against illegal file-sharing as music tunes were easily ripped and shared on online platforms. The launch of iTunes and the iPod provided it with a lifeline in the form of revenue for legitimately purchased downloads. It also revived the revenue of Apple, which was struggling in a market dominated by Windows PCs.