Apple’s iPod shipment is indeed in decline. Cause Apple is now on the way to announce the withdrawn of two iPod models in the in the next week’s Media event. Rumors are there that Apple is going to put a full stop to its entire iPod section. TUAW claims that those who are planning to buy an Apple iPod Classic or iPod shuffle should hurry up because most probably these two devices are going to get axed very soon.
iPod is the product that contributes a very small portion to Apple’s revenue (in the last 3 months of 2010 iPod caused only eight percent of Apple’s total revenue) and these contribution is also decreasing due to the heavy market of iPhones.
During their last earning call, Apple discussed a product transition in order to compensate the loss of discontinuing the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Classic – that’s why Apple is now going to introduce some more features to the iPod Touch, according to TUAW reports. Probably one of the changes in iPod Touch will be the introduction of the White model that had been proposed in the past. But the point is that iPod Classic comes with a storage of 160 GB, while iPod Touch offers only 128 GB. Customers will never want to give up a memory storage of 160 GB. So, it may seem likely that Apple is turning their back to the customers’ loyalty section, although with the iCloud services there is no need of such a huge amount of storage in a device because iCloud is like a digital storage locker.
The iPod Shuffle and the iPod Classic represent two very different segments of iPod line. The iPod Shuffle has no screen and it is of course the smallest iPod while iPod Classic represents the bulky style of iPods which still depends on hard drive technology for storage. So if these two iPods get axed, then the iPod Nano is going to be the iPod in Budget and iPod classic will represent the expensive iPods.