Apple’s Click Wheel Rolls Away
2001 was a huge year for Apple with their introduction of sleek and trendy music players. Apple found hungry listeners demanding their click wheel music player: the iPod. The iPod family continued to grow and in 2005 introduced iPod Shuffles and Nanos which made a splash. With their vibrant colors and convenient size swept up eager music downloaders everywhere. The years following that boom have resulted in a decline in these MP3 players with iPhones and other similar smart phones taking on the bulk of music playing capabilities. Today those relics, Nano and Shuffle, have officially been retired.
The iPod Family from oldest (original far left) to the most recent generation (touch and video). Source: Lifewire.com and Apple.
Apple announced this week that they will be taking their Nanos and Shuffles off the shelves (not that they’ve been necessarily on the shelves…) and will no longer be producing them. The iPod Touch lives on though – and at a bargain. Originally selling for upwards of $500 when released and marketing as “carrying a thousand songs in your pocket”, you can now buy a 64GB iPhone for $199 and 128 GB for $299. The original was a mere 5GB! With these deflated prices the iPods should live on for a bit longer for nostalgic purposes.
Source: Wired.com
The clickwheel is synonymous with early 2000’s along with Napster, Limewire, and cringe worthy (and addicting) pop and alternative hits (think Now That’s What I Call Music Volume 10…we are currently at Volume 96). Shuffle and Nano came a few years after the original iPod in 2005 and made a great marketing run in the fitness industry because of the lack of song skipping and easily attached to the body without being bulky or heavy. It beat out its competitors like SanDisk and Eclipse and far outlived them. With music streaming services like Spotify and, obviously, Apple Music, making waves MP3 players have become even more dated and unusable. Despite their halt in technology, these mementos live on in Ebay and have been resold and sought after…like antiques.
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