14 DAY TRIAL // Speaking at the WSJD Live conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained why Apple had to put the iPod Classic to sleep this year, revealing a sad truth about the low-level manufacturing hurdles that take place in the Far East.
Apple had two choices on the table: either redesign the thing and build it anew or axe it altogether. Looking at its options, it chose the latter scenario, a decision likely also aided by the declining iPod sales as a business overall.
“They don’t make them anymore”
Cook touched on a wide range of topics at the WSJD Live conference, but when he was asked why Apple shelved the iPod Classic, his answer was brief: “We couldn't get the parts anymore,” said Cook. “They don't make them anymore.”
He elaborated, explaining that in order to keep this product alive, the Cupertino company would have to come up with a new design for it.
“We would have to make a whole new product.... the engineering work to do that would be massive,” Cook said.
The Apple boss wouldn’t go any further with his comments regarding the technicalities, but we have a pretty good guess what those unavailable parts are. In fact, chances are it’s not parts, but a single part that doesn’t get manufactured anymore: the 160GB spinning hard drive.
Apple these days equips all its iDevices, including all iPod players, with NAND Flash memory chips. The iPod classic was the last remaining iPod that used a traditional (albeit very small) hard drive based on spinning platters.
This tiny hard drive was presumably no longer relevant to build because the iPod classic was likely the only device out there to still use it somewhat successfully. And since the iPod classic wasn’t selling like hot cakes anymore...
The second reason could well be the primary one
“The number of people who wanted it is very small,” Cook added. Well, to us this sounds like the first and foremost reason why the iPod Classic got canned. Not to call Cook a liar, but if something sells, the company does everything in its power to keep the fire burning. And if that meant giving it a new hard drive, redesigning it, or equipping it with flash storage, they’d have done it. But they didn’t. Which makes the declining sales the primary reason why the classic had to die.
And you can expect the same to happen to the rest of the iPod line. Starting with the iPod shuffle and ending with the iPod touch.