The End of the iPod Classic?

Marco Arment is claiming the end is here for the iPod Classic:

It’s very clear that the Classic is a temporary product, stuck in the lineup as a bridge for high-storage-needs users (I’ll get to them in a minute) until flash memory is cheap enough to make a sufficiently high-capacity Touch. But it may not need to meet that capacity, exactly. When the Classic’s largest capacity dropped from 160 to 120 GB in the last refresh, nobody cared.

There’s some good logic here. The Classic is the only iPod left with a hard drive for storage, and feels ancient when compared to its smaller siblings.

But the inevitable objection is this: “I can’t fit my entire library on an iPod touch!” It’s a good objection, but Arment believes that 32GB — the high end iPhone and iPod touch — is enough for most users, and thus, renders the Classic unnecessary.

As someone with a big library, it is nice to be able to carry everything in it everywhere I go, but I’m in the minority, I think.

As flash-based devices catch up in terms of capacity, the hard-drive based iPod classic will die. Will it happen at Apple’s event tomorrow? Maybe, maybe not. But one day, it will go the way of the dodo.