Apple Stops Producing the IPOD!

Many of us 30 and over spent most of our adult lives enjoying music on Apple’s Ipod, the premiere digital music player. Now after 16 years on the shelf, Apple will no longer produce Ipod’s that are simply digital music players, they will be discontinued. It is a sad day for Music fans. For more on this story check out the details from wired.com below. Do you still use an Ipod to listen to music? Or do you use some other device. Let us know AFTER THE JUMP!

After nearly 16 years on the market, more than 400 million units sold, and one Cupertino company launched into the stratosphere on its back, Apple quietly pulled the iPod Nano and Shuffle out of its virtual stores today. The iPod Touch still lives on: In fact, Apple now offers the Touch with 32 gigs of storage starting at $199. But that’s not a real iPod; it’s an iPhone-lite. Today officially marks the end of Apple’s era of standalone music players.

You could argue that the iPod killed the album, making playlists and Shuffle Mode the primary methods of listening. It definitely helped kill paid-for music, because who can afford to buy all 5,000 songs to fill their iPod? Eventually, the industry caught up, trading downloads for subscriptions and albums for Discover Weekly playlists. Music became so readily available that companies had to invent new ways to find it—Alexa works much faster than a clickwheel. That’s the beautiful irony here: The music industry Apple helped create, dominated by streaming and algorithms and discovery, no longer has a place for the iPod.