The heftiest iPod of them all, the iPod Classic; which can hold up to a jaw-dropping 160GB of media, is celebrating its tenth birthday today. It is also mourning the fact that it might be coming to an end. It seems that the iPod Classic might be headed out the door after serving quite a few years in Apple's sales arsenal. The iPod Classic was not refreshed during last Fall's iPod event.
Most people will agree that the iPod Touch is the better iPod because of the myriad of functions it can perform. Click wheel iPods simply cannot scale up to the iOS age that Apple has brought us into.
Covered here, by Phillip Swanson, is a report of Apple discontinuing click wheel games. It seems to make sense when you put two and two together. The iPod Classic is a click wheel iPod. Slowly, it seems, Apple has been trying to steer away from the older generation of iPods and into the new realm of iOS devices. Apple is certainly interested in multitouch devices - an ambition that has been illuminated through the push of gestures in Mac OS X Lion, and the consistent refresh of iPod Touches, iPhones, and iPads. The current version of the iPod nano even supports multitouch.
Another thing to consider is that the iPod Classic uses a hard disk drive for its media storage as shown here by a tear-down performed by iFixit. So far, all of the other iPod models use flash memory. Apple has even brought flash memory to its refreshed MacBook Airs which used to house a 120GB 4200-rpm hard disk drive (before the new design refresh two generations ago). Another form of memory that Apple is introducing is storage in the cloud. Apple's Macs and iOS devices all have the capability to connect to the internet to store media without using their internal storage via iCloud. Could this be another reason that Apple may be doing away with the iPod Classic?
Would you like to see the iPod classic leave Apple's racks? Share your thoughts below.
Sources: Apple, iFixit
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