Oh My God! They've Killed The IPod Classic - You Bastards!

10 September 2014 | 3:08 pm | Hannah Story

The iPod Classic is dead.

Sorry, what, you didn’t know? Well you’re excused, because Apple didn’t bother to tell us. Not at their Big Event (I do not care about a watch and an iPhone that’s like an iPad but not really); not in a press release; not even as a sly Facebook update. They just quietly removed it from their website like it never existed, like it’s some kind of outdated piece of technology that no one really uses or buys anymore. Can you feel the muso outrage simmering under the surface?

We reckon the iPod Classic deserved a fair hearing.

It’s near unanimous in The Music offices: we’re devastated. And we reckon the iPod Classic deserved a fair hearing. Yes, that old economic concept of planned obsolescence has meant that we’ve had to buy at least a couple over the years, when we started to hear it whir and splutter like an old old dog, but you know what? In six months or a year, we probably would’ve dropped another $250 on a new one, that’s how much we like it.

Techheads everywhere don’t give a rat’s; they’re too busy celebrating the idea of having a phone on their wrist or some shit (seriously what the fuck is that?). They say the clickwheel is redundant; that it’s too hard to connect a cable to a computer to sync your music; that the harddrive in the iPod Classic is inferior to the mighty 64GB iPod Touch’s flash drive (NOT ENOUGH STORAGE), etcetera, etcetera, this is the new way, get on board man, join the line-up around the corner from the Apple Store so that you can be the first suck to own a new thing.

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What’s that? Apple’s decided to get rid of a device with 160GB of storage space at the exact same time as they announce a 128GB iPhone 6? Well, fancy that!

And maybe we’re old hat, but we quite liked the iPod Classic. It was made to store and play music (and photos, but does anyone have photos on those things?), 160GB of it. That’s it. One purpose. Done. Easy. Your whole iTunes library in your hand. Sick of listening to Metallica? No sweat, here’s Miley Cyrus, and so on and so on, you could have everything. Yes, it’s a niche service, some people may not want or need to clutch that much music in their hand. But we did. We liked it. The same people that bought the first iPod in 2001, who had Discmans, who had Walkmans, who collect(ed) vinyl, liked to have their entire music collection in the palm of their hands - ­ the music nerds, the writers, the producers, the bands, the industry. Sure, streaming services have meant that you don’t need that much music stored anywhere, you just need a 3G or 4G network or Wi-Fi; sure, apparently you can save all your tunes in the Cloud thanks to the $25-a-year iTunes Match and then download ‘em as you go; sure, lots of things, but la la la la la, we can’t hear you, we liked our iPods.

But honestly, it just feels like a classic marketing ploy. What’s that? Apple’s decided to get rid of a device with 160GB of storage space at the exact same time as they announce a 128GB iPhone 6? Well, fancy that! We’ll all just have to go out and buy iPhone 6s now. Except so much of the storage space on that will get sucked up by apps and photographs and iMessages and maybe, just maybe, some people like using Android (this can neither be confirmed nor denied).

Anyway, you can’t get ‘em online anymore, but maybe if you walk into your local Apple Store they’ll still be in stock, and you can buy a couple. Might last you until 2016.

IPod Classic, we already miss you.