The sales figures are not promising. Last quarter, Apple
sold just 6.8 million iPods -- a 10% drop from the same quarter last year.
While that is more than the 4 million Macs the company moved in the same time
period, it is just a drop in the bucket compared with the 26 million iPhones
and 17 million iPads it sold in the same quarter.
In a statement released to the media last week, Apple CEO
Tim Cook ignored iPods completely, saying, "We’re
thrilled with record
sales of 17 million iPads in the June quarter. We’ve also just updated the
entire MacBook line, will release Mountain Lion tomorrow and will be launching
iOS 6 this fall. We are also really looking forward to the amazing new products
we’ve got in the pipeline.”
And as Louis Ramirez at Deal News points out, the iPod
hasn't had a major refresh in two years.
Apple currently has four iPods on the market -- the iPod
touch, which starts at $199, the iPod Nano that starts at $129, the iPod
Shuffle, which sells for a mere $49, and the iPod classic, which can cost as
much as $249 for 160 GB of storage.
It is obvious that the convergence issue is partly to
blame for the decline of the iPod -- after all, when your phone is essentially
an iPod, why carry an additional piece of equipment just to store your music?
And as Adrian Kingsley Hughes argues at ZDNET, sales of
the iPod are also hampered by saturation.
"Apple has sold a shade over 350 million iPods since
its debut in 2001," he writes. "That's a lot of iPods, and I can tell
you as having owned quite a few over the years, they're incredibly long-lived
bits of kit. Everyone who wanted an iPod more than likely has several laying
about the place already. (http://www.latimes.com)
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