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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

Obviously they don't have to do anything with it, it's still profitable and has high margins. There's obviously some potential to grow though.

The touch is basically a prepaid phone with no phone chip. They could add that phone chip and absorb the margin hit through scale in China, etc. Bound to happen sooner or later.

The nano is a redesign away from assaulting the global watch market (over $40 bln this year).

The shuffle, I could seem them innovating the form factor, why not abstract it right into the earbuds.

The classic is dead, growth wise so they can keep selling it but don't think it'd shock anyone if they shut it down tomorrow.

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I think the classic will die when you can fit 256GB into an iPod Touch, either through flash memory or a thicker hard drive version. Otherwise the iPod Classic still sells to those that _HAVE_ to have 200+ GB of music with them at all times.

Yeah well there was still a market for x-serves but it wasn't big enough so eventually they killed it.

The only way I can see them getting growth out of the classic would be to put the massive memory to work hauling HD video around instead of music. That does suggest an interesting iOS device maybe aimed at high end camcorders if they can find a tiny 1 TB drive in the pipe somewhere.

They're probably selling 20-30 times as many iPod Classics/year as they ever did xserves, even at their peak. The xserve also didn't do anything to act as a draw toward other Apple products, and required frequent revisions to keep up. I bet ongoing iPod Classic R&D budget is statistical noise.

I'm not making a close analogy and I'm not saying they should shut it down.

I'm just saying Apple will know when the classic isn't worth the time/energy/shelf space and I wouldn't be shocked if they announced this is the case in weeks rather then years.

And I guess I'm making a wild guess as to how they might keep an HDD based idevice relevant although I don't think that's particularly likely either.

> Otherwise the iPod Classic still sells to those that _HAVE_ to have 200+ GB of music with them at all times.

The Classic does not go beyond 160GB, you'd think (finally) having a 128GB touch would be sufficient to drop the Classic.

The Classic is $249. The 64GB Touch is $399. Even if the next revision got 128GB at $399, that's a major price difference. A lot of people who would pay for the 160GB Classic are not going to pay for a 128GB $399 Touch.

It amuses me to no end that people really believe Apple cares about someone with a 100+ GB music library.

Apple will kill the Classic whenever it’s convenient. If there’s one small bump on the road to continuing to ship the Classic they just won’t anymore.

Another route they could take with the ipod touch/phone idea, is make faceTime and its underlying software a first-class VOIP phone network with clients on multiple platforms and sell the ipod as a wifi phone without a subscription fee. I'm not sure how easy this would be given their agreements with cell providers, but it would be an interesting move.

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