Apple’s Digital Music Player Lives On With Release Of New iPod touch

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FEATURE: 06.07.19- Just when you thought it was safe to go back in to the water, so to speak, last Tuesday Apple quietly released a new seventh generation model of the iPod touch, extending the life of its iconic MP3 music player and showing that the iPod is not dead just yet.

Apple kicked off the Summer, the day after its unofficial start, by updating its product lineup with “the new iPod touch” — as it officially has been called — keeping its offering of a trio of iOS devices together for the time being. The long drought without an updated model seemed to suggest that the Sun had set on the iPod touch and the only two iOS devices that would remain were the iPhone and iPad lines.

The Apple Music app on the new iPod touch. (Photo: Courtesy of Apple)

The new iPod touch comes in three storage capacities with 32GB for $199, 128GB for $299, and 256GB for $399, all of which come in six colors with blue, gold, pink, (PRODUCT) RED)™, silver, and space gray.

The following are highlights of the new features of the device:

  • A10 Fusion chip with up to 2x faster performance and up to 3x better graphics
  • support for AR (augmented reality) experiences like games
  • support for group FaceTime
  • delivers great battery life

The new iPod touch also retains its 4-inch form factor — rather than increase to phablet size to mirror current iPhone models — allowing it to remain thin and light, measuring only 0.24 in (6.1 mm) and weighing just 3.10 oz (88 g).

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With its top of the line model now weighing in at an expansive 256GB of storage, one of the selling points of the new iPod touch heartens back to the spirit of the original iPod as a portable music player that holds all of your songs. Whether purchased through the iTunes Store or downloaded for listening offline from an Apple Music subscription (which Apple touts) with its catalog of more than 50 million songs. Prior to this, the highest storage capacity released by Apple was the 160GB iPod classic which could hold approximately 40,000 songs.

While Apple announced earlier this week at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2019) that it will be discontinuing the iTunes application on the Mac in the upcoming release to its computer operating system, MacOS Catalina version 10.15, people will still be able to access all of their content like music, TV shows, and movies from the old iTunes library folder through three new applications — Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts — which will work as it did before albeit in segregated form. There was no word on whether the new Apple Music application on the Mac will be able to rip songs from CDs and import them onto your computer in order to load onto the new iPod touch (or any other device you have for that matter).

And although iTunes is going away, people still can continue to purchase songs from the iTunes Store on the Mac with the new Apple Music application. The same goes for the iTunes Store app on iOS. However, it is yet unknown if it will remain as a standalone app in the forthcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 13, or whether it will follow suit and find its way into the Apple Music app and merge together like it will on the Mac.

Shortly after the beginning of the year, as reported in this very column, rumors of a seventh generation iPod touch were predicted by research analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities. It would seem that he was correct once again with his forecast of upcoming Apple products in the pipeline, something of which he has had a very good track record with that is often — if not always — spot on most of the time.

The sixth generation model that preceded the new iPod touch was released back in 2015 and only would receive a minor refresh a year so afterwards with its storage capacities doubled from its original 16GB and 64GB versions to 32GB and 128GB respectively.

The extended period of time without any update to the iPod touch seemed to seal the deal of the demise of the iconic Apple MP3 music player which slowly saw its popularity wane with the advent of the iPHone, itself being a portable music player as well. The iPod touch was the sole holdover after the other recent models of the iPod — the classic (the name given later to the original), the nano, and the shuffle — were finally retired, the former in 2014 and the latter two in 2017.

Just when it looked like the iPod was completely dead indeed, Apple pulled a Mark Twain of sorts last week and finally surprised us with an updated iPod touch. To quote Twain himself, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

It also would seem that reports of the death of the iPod were premature too as it lives on with the release of the new iPod touch.

The new iPod touch is available for purchase online at apple.com or on the Apple Store app on iOS and already should be in stores by now at an Apple Store retail location near you (call ahead for availability).

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