The Minidisc killer is now itself dead.

[ShriDurga]

Amid all the hype last week over the Apple Watch and iPhone 6 unveilings the demise of the iconic iPod was largely overlooked, which is probably one of the main reasons why Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) decided the era of its revolutionary “1,000 songs in your pocket” gadget was over. Why have a separate product that’s essentially an iPhone without the phone?

Even before Apple announced the end to the portable music player that single-handedly ended the Sony Walkman’s decades-long reign from cassette to CD, sales of the iPod were declining -- by a lot. In the company’s first quarter of 2014 the player made up only 2 percent of Apple sales revenue compared to 56 percent for the iPhone. In the past six fiscal years, iPod sales declined from nearly $10 billion at their peak in 2008, a year after the iPhone debuted, to less than $5 billion last year.

http://www.ibtimes.com/rip-apple-ipod-iconic-digital-player-beat-them-all-has-been-consumed-iphones-success-1688266

[freddyjollo]

hmm $5 billion still seems a lot? just half of at peak?

[PsychoPimpKiller]

Apple and other phone companies don't want you to have a digital copy of your music. They would rather you use some type of "cloud" storage or access your music by streaming it. That all costs me data that I have to pay for or not be able to use for Youtube or internet, unless I am on wifi which is only when I am at home. People think I am weird because I have about 40gb of music on my Galaxy Note 3 but I'd rather do that than stream it and use up my data.

 

I personally like having all of my music on my 160gb iPod. I'm not an Apple fanboy at all but they did make some decent products. Surprisingly I've had my 160gb iPod for 7 years and the battery and device itself work just fine. I know how to fix it though if it ever broke though. I have upgraded plenty of old iPods for myself and friends and family. I love my minidiscs but there are sometimes when an iPod is so much easier, like when I'm work. I run heavy equipment and the machines have cassette players in them so I have to use a cassette adapter to listen to my music on a very cheap stereo system anyway, so the quality of minidisc wouldn't make any difference at all. I mainly use my minidiscs to record onto though. although I do have a CA790X in my Fiero so I use minidisc exclusively in that car.