If the answer’s “yes,” then Apple boss Tim Cook wants you to know that, strictly speaking, it wasn’t his company that consigned the iPod Classic to city museums and forthcoming tech auctions — it dumped the device because other companies stopped making the parts.
Cook’s comments that Apple “couldn’t find the parts anymore” came during a Q&A session at the WSJ.D conference in Laguna Beach, California on Monday night. To underline his point that Apple shouldn’t be held directly responsible for culling the Classic, he added, “It wasn’t a matter of me swinging the ax, saying, ‘what can I kill today.'”
And forget any idea that the tech giant might one day replace it with something similar, using parts manufacturers do still make.
“We would have to make a whole new product,” Cook told the audience. “The engineering work to do that would be massive.” And then came the sledgehammer comment, the truth, the underlying and rather obvious reason why Apple killed off the Classic: “The number of people who wanted it is very small.”
The iPod Classic, which quietly disappeared from the Cupertino company’s website last month, was the sixth generation of the hugely popular digital media player that launched in 2001 and helped revive the Apple brand.
The initial version, complete with its iconic scroll wheel, at first only offered a measly sounding 5GB of storage, though it was of course enough to put “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The final model, however, offered a whopping 160GB of space, handled photos and videos as well as audio, and made a lot of people very happy.
