Sam Oliver
Three months after its official demise, Apple's iPod Classic — Â the last model to come packing a high-capacity spinning drive — Â remains popular on marketplace sites like eBay, with buyers willing to pay hundreds of dollars extra to get one.
The 160-gigabyte variant is on offer for $495.99 from third-party sellers Amazon, for instance, nearly double its original retail price of $260. The premium pricing was first noted by The Guardian.
More than 3,000 iPod Classic units are said to have been sold on eBay since October, while nearly 2,000 are currently listed for sale.
The 160-gigabyte iPod Classic remains the highest-capacity portable device Apple has ever produced, useful for those who prefer high-resolution audio or simply choose to carry their entire music collection with them. The current-generation iPod touch maxes out at 64 gigabytes, while the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPad Air 2 are available in 128-gigabyte configurations.
At the time it was pulled from shelves, the iPod Classic had gone five years without an update. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company was no longer able to source parts to build the device, and its sales numbers were not worth re-engineering with new components.
"We would have to make a whole new product," Cook said. "The engineering work to do that would be massive. The number of people who wanted it is very small."
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This is going to mess up the iPod lawsuit. Now those crazy lawyers will be able to use these prices as justification that Apple always intended on locking people into their ecosystem and raised their prices accordingly. I'm sure people who buy these iPods will demand that Apple let them install Real DRM-based music on them. /s
I'm not second guessing Apple's decision (much), but to say "We would have to make a whole new product," Cook said. "The engineering work to do that would be massive. The number of people who wanted it is very small." is disingenious at best. Massive? There are Kickstarter projects more complicated than this. The real answer is that this is a niche product with a limited life (iPhones will have this much capacity soon), so Apple doesn't want to "lose focus" by devoting any resources to it. Disclaimer: I have an 80 gig iPod classic sitting in a drawer than I haven't touched in years.
I have an older one (has the classic white face on it), but I doubt it's worth anything.
I'm not second guessing Apple's decision (much), but to say
"We would have to make a whole new product," Cook said. "The engineering work to do that would be massive. The number of people who wanted it is very small."
is disingenious at best. Massive? There are Kickstarter projects more complicated than this. The real answer is that this is a niche product with a limited life (iPhones will have this much capacity soon), so Apple doesn't want to "lose focus" by devoting any resources to it.
Disclaimer: I have an 80 gig iPod classic sitting in a drawer than I haven't touched in years.
I have a 3rd gen iPod classic that I don't even remember how to turn on. With 16GB, it still has more storage than most base iPhones. The problem with building a new iPod classic is what form factor do you use? The iPod Touch could be altered to include more memory but do users want all the capabilities of the Touch on a simply iPod? If no, then you're back to the Nano form factor and I don't think that could be re-engineered to hold 10-20x more RAM. If people only want simple iPod tasks, then customizing a Touch with a smaller screen and more RAM shouldn't be that hard but simply adding a SD slot might be easier. The problem with that, however, is that everyone would want an SD slot for their iPhones, and I don't see that happening.
As usual Apple doesn't regularly produce products for a market it sees as small. I fought that for years wanting a diskless iMac and Apple would only allow it to be done by an Apple authorized dealer after it was shipped, they wouldn't alter the assembly line to not include an internal drive, microphone or camera. Apple is the second coming of Henry Ford: you can have any color of car you want as long as it's black.
The reengineering argument is just nonsense. If the hard drives were discontinued, Apple could fit the classic with flash storage. It's not that Classic owners demand a hard drive, they want the great sound quality and a lot of storage (and perhaps the simplicity too).