Is Apple killing off iPod?

Earlier this week the company announced that its iOS 5 operating system for devices would arrive in the autumn but has made a beta version available in advance to developers.

Business Insider notes that on the operating system the iPhone app which used to be called ‘iPod’ (through which users could play their music stored on iTunes) has now been renamed simply ‘Music’.

It writes, “Apple is probably mostly trying to unify the experience across all of its iOS devices, so playing music and videos is the same on all of them.”

It adds, “But it’s hard to overlook that Apple is also probably starting the inevitable wind-down of the iPod brand.”

Apple introduced the iPod in October 2001 and since then it has gone through multiple product evolutions including the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano, the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Touch.

Since 2007, however, Apple’s portable device focus has really been on the iPhone and the iPad. Its last updates for the iPod family were the sixth generation Nano, the fourth generation iPod Touch and the fourth generation Shuffle in September 2010.

The iPod Classic has not been updated since 2009 when the only feature update was a storage increase to 160GB.

In the company’s latest earnings call for Q1 2011 it announced that iPod sales had dropped 19% to 9.02m units globally compared to Q1 2010. In contrast, iPhone sales were up by 113% to 18.65m units.

Source: Music Week