While Apple doesn’t usually break out sales figures for individual products, during Tuesday’s conference call with analysts, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer went out of his way to say that the iPod touch itself did “extremely well in the quarter, growing more than 130 percent” compared to the year-ago quarter. In other words, while iPod sales in general fell 7.2 percent compared to last quarter, the iPod touch was selling like gangbusters.
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Oppenheimer admitted that the company saw these sales declines coming.
“This is one of the original reasons we developed the iPhone and the iPod touch,” he said. “We expect our traditional MP3 players to decline over time as we cannibalize ourselves with the iPod touch and the iPhone. However, we have a great business that we believe will last for many years and which we will continue to manage well and offer the world’s most innovative products.”
The iPod touch is the perfect device for most people — it has all the benefits of the iPhone without the AT&T contact. The iPod nano and iPod classic are like dumb phones — slowly being replaced by smarter, better devices.
I think the iPod classic’s days are especially numbered. The player’s best feature — its sheer storage capacity — will be matched by solid state iPods within a few years. At that point, I think Apple will stop shipping the Classic with its spinning hard drive, leaving the iPod nano and Shuffle to offset their bigger, more expensive, touch-based brothers.