‘The spirit lives on’: Apple to discontinue the iPod after 21 years

Apple has discontinued the iPod more than 20 years after it was launched.

The most recent iteration of the music player, the iPod Touch, has not been updated since 2019, and many of its features are now available on other products.

Apple said it would continue to sell the Touch, the only generation of the iPod still on sale, "while supplies last".

The iPod was released in 2001, and was the first MP3 player capable of storing 1,000 songs. Aside from the Touch, versions included the iPod mini, iPod Nano, and iPod Shuffle.

By 2011, Apple held a 70% global market share in MP3 players, and to date more than 400m iPods have been sold.

The company stopped selling the Nano and Shuffle, its last standalone music players, in 2017, and industry experts had long predicted the Touch would follow given the prevalence of the iPhone and other smartphones that can be used to listen to music.

Later versions of the Touch increasingly resembled smartphones, allowing users to take photos, send emails and make video calls.

In a statement announcing the discontinuation, Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, said the "spirit of iPod 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," he said.