It's the end of an era - time to say goodbye to the iPod.
Apple is discontinuing the iconic device more than 20 years after it became the face of portable music and kickstarted its meteoric evolution into the world's biggest company.
The iPod Touch, the only version of the portable music player still being sold today, will be available for as long as current supplies last, Apple said in a blog post entitled 'the music lives on'.
"Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impacted more than just the music industry - it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
"Today, the spirit of iPod lives on. We’ve integrated an incredible music experience across all of our products... and Apple Music delivers industry-leading sound quality with support for spatial audio."
Since its launch in 2001, the iPod took on a storm of competing music players before being eclipsed by smartphones, online music streaming and within the Apple pantheon, by the rise of the iPhone.
The iPod has undergone several iterations since its inception featuring a scroll wheel, the capacity to store a 1000 songs and a 10-hour battery-life. The version that has been carried till date - the iPod Touch - was launched in 2007, the same year as the iPhone.
Apple stopped reporting iPod sales in 2015.
Reuters / Newshub.
