Apple Kills the iPod Nano and Shuffle

Apple has announced that it will be killing off its low-end iPods, with both the iPod Nano and the Shuffle leaving the company’s lineup of music players. The only remaining iPod that Apple has left is the iPod Touch, which will also receive changes to storage capacities.

“Today, we are simplifying our iPod lineup with two models of iPod touch now with double the capacity starting at just $199 and we are discontinuing the iPod shuffle and iPod nano,” Apple said in a statement.

Once the biggest part of Apple’s business, the iPod has been continuously outsold by the iPhone in recent years. Taking a backseat to the Mac and iPhone, the iPod lineup (especially the Nano and Shuffle) has seen little to no refreshes for several years. Both the discontinued iPods were refreshed with new colors in 2015, but their designs haven’t been revamped since 2012 for the Nano and 2012 for the Shuffle.

The only remaining iPod is the iPod Touch, which has received some capacity changes; 32GB for $199 and 128GB for $299, with Apple killing the 16GB and 64GB options. The Touch is basically an iPhone without the phone, but can hook into Apple’s current services and access the App Store.

Discontinuing these lower-end iPods makes sense. Both the Nano and Shuffle don’t connect into Apple’s online services. With iCloud and Apple Music becoming more and more important for the company, having hardware that doesn’t take use of those services doesn’t make sense for the company anymore.

While Apple has become more of a services company than a hardware one over the years, that doesn’t mean these iPods were doing well anyway. Apple has stated that as of July 2017, they’ve sold 400 million iPods, paling in comparison to the iPhone, which has now sold over a billion units.