The nano and shuffle will likely just coast indefinitely, keep selling them but no updates other than maybe capacity. The big question is the iPod touch. At $299 the touch is the same price as the non retina iPad mini. Is there really enough of a market for the touch, or would most potential customers just get the mini instead.
Honestly if I were Apple and I thought the touch was worth keeping around (and honestly, there might not be enough demand for a "tablet" the size of a phone), I would redesign and rebrand it into an iPad micro (5 inch), including an option with cellular data. That's really more of what it is anyway.
Don't want an iPhone. If the discontinue the iPod Touch that is one more Apple product I'm not spending money on. Cook just doesn't get it.
He doesn't get what? He didn't say they're discontinuing anything, just that it's a declining market.
And they'll discontinue the iPod touch for the same reason any company would discontinue any product, if it's not selling enough. At this point I would think most potential touch customers would be looking at the iPad mini anyway.
Steve Jobs would have seen opportunity to do something drastic to revive the iPod.
Steve
did see an opportunity to revive it, and he did that years ago. He added a phone to it.
They can keep selling the same designs as long as sales are enough, but spending much on updating or redesigning would be money down the toilet (at least beyond bumping capacity). The decline is because more and more people are getting smart phones and they consider a dedicated mp3 player redundant functionality and something extra to carry around. There will probably be people for a long time who want a small music player for things like exercise so we'll probably see at least one model continue for a long time. But for the most part there's nothing to be done about the decline. Other than happily taking the money from people buying more expensive iPhones instead.
Does it matter that these people are not a mass market? I would argue that the MBP or Mac Pro is for a minority of people. But Apple still do it because it's profitable and because it brings wealthy people into their ecosystem.
The MBP and MP aren't declining like the iPod is. And the iPod is the cheapest product Apple makes while the MP is the most expensive. There's also zero evidence that the typical iPod customer is a "wealthy person".
Why buy a 64GB iPod touch when you can buy a 64GB iPhone (for 3x the price).
The real question for many customers is why buy ANY iPod when you can buy a phone that includes the same functionality? Most people want to carry around one device. Period. For many of those people, there's nothing that can be done that would make them buy a music player when what they really want is a phone.
