When Apple quietly pulled the iPod classic from its online store the day of the iPhone 6 event earlier this month, it meant the last iPod click wheel from Apple had finally been retired in place of touch screens and voice input. Tony Fadell, CEO of Google-acquired Nest Labs who is most known for his work in the iPod division at Apple through late 2008, spoke with Fast Company to discuss the death of the last click wheel iPod:
“I’m sad to see it go,” Fadell admits in a phone interview. “The iPod’s been a huge part of my life for the last decade. The team that worked on the iPod poured literally everything into making it what it was.” […] “Products just don’t come around like that often,” laments Fadell. “The iPod was one-in-a-million.”
Tony Fadell, of course, left Apple long before the company sent the last iPod with a touch wheel out to sea.
Fadell left Apple in late 2008 shortly after the iPhone’s release in mid-2007. Nest Labs, which makes the connected Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector, was founded by Fadell in 2010 and bought by Google in 2014 for $3.2 billion.
According to Fadell, Apple was thinking about what would kill the iPod as early as 2003:
“It was inevitable something would take its place. You know, in 2003 or 2004, we started asking ourselves what would kill the iPod,” Fadell says. “And even back then, at Apple, we knew it was streaming. We called it the ‘celestial jukebox in the sky.’ And we have that now: music in the cloud.”
For context, the last iPod classic released came out in late 2007 which minor revisions following for two years. The same model introduced in 2009 remained on sale through 2014.
Aside from nostalgia for the old click wheel model, the iPod classic did have one thing going for it: 160GB of local storage for holding your iTunes collection. Apple hasn’t yet replaced the iPod with something in this space (the largest iPod touch is still 64GB), but the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models come close with 128GB models.
Of course, if you are still nostalgic about the classic iPod click wheel design, you may still have a chance to purchase an iPod classic before they really become antiques.
You can read the full interview with Fadell over at Fast Company.
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It’s the end of an era, but it’s like watching LCDs replace CRTs. They had a good run, nothing to be ashamed of.
“The Celestial Jukebox in the Sky”… the final resting place of the iPod.
Cartoonists, get busy already…
It is not about nostalgia! It is about not offering a reasonable option to your long time customers. It is about having a dedicated music player that is fast and simple to operate and does what is supposed to, – play and store lots of music. Period. There simply isn’t such an option today. I hate it how these dumb nerds like to make it all sound as if it is all about keeping up with technology. It is about practicality. An iPhone or even an iPod touch is extremely impractical as a portable music player because of cost and too many bells and whistles that only get in the way. Not to mention lots of people treasure their musical devices and would like to take really good care of them. I used to wash my hands before using my iPod just like I did before handling a CD. Once your musical device is also your phone that option goes out the window. Learning curve and time wasted with non-related actions as well as glitches are also a big turn-off in these jack-of-all-trades type devices. I read a number of forum posts where lots of people were having problems with syncing their iPod touch with their iTunes library, an action that used to be very simple. Long discussions were taking place, third party software was suggested and days (not to mention nerves) were consumed needlessly. Here’s my point: “I want a chocolate ice-cream.” “ Well you can have an ice-cream with a little bit of chocolate that also has kiwi and asparagus jelly twirl that also gives you the option to buy more ice-cream from us at a quadruple price.” “Okay but can I have my big chocolate ice-cream now?” “ No! we can only give you a mix of chocolate with asparagus jelly and piss-wiz soda. It’s what everyone has nowadays.” “No thank you very much!”
The truth is that these techy-nitwit millionaires who are the adulated so called smart guys of this generation are turning the whole society into servile dead brains. You got to buy whatever shit their fancy decides to produce regardless of how useless it is. Having no concern for what the customers want. Remember that old concept where the customer used to decide? If there’s anything I am nostalgic about is the time when companies understood that concept and followed it. Today this concept has disappeared with most companies and they’ve taken up leading us by the nose and telling us what we need. Consumers on their part have lost cerebral versatility and have become contented to munch docilely whatever crap these Apple cocksuckers decide to make or not make. Pathetic. You’re all utterly pathetic spineless worms. A company should care about what people need, If they are not able to do that they should just go out of business. I don’t need their thousand shits. I really don’t. I am not anti-technology. I just want to be able to decide what technology I use and what I spend my hard earned money on. The later devices (such as iphones) are triple in price and offer less performance for the area I am interested in: music. The iPod classic did that well. Why not continue to offer it for the many people who clearly have found a use for it for which the touch devices are just not good enough. Where are the options you fucking pompous milksop dictators?