Death Of The iPod Classic Was Due To Availability Of Parts

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple was no longer able to source parts for the iPod Classic, which was the last of its kind to have a spinning hard drive for storing up to 160GB worth of music. He confirmed that development of a replacement model would not be pursued. "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." While Apple did not officially announce it would be discontinuing production of the iPod classic, the company quietly removed the device from its website and online store shortly after September's iPhone event. The iPod classic was a design carryover from the music player's heyday and was most recently modified in 2009. Aside from a few aesthetic tweaks, however, the functional bits remained untouched for more than 6 years. With the iPod classic's demise, Apple now fields a total of three iPod models. iPod shuffle, iPod nano and iPod touch, all flash based devices with storage capacities maxing out at 64GB.