Today I’m going to talk about the iPod Touch, the only iPod model you can buy today. We’ll explore why it was developed and why it’s still being sold, when all the other iPod models have been discontinued.
The story of the iPod Touch begins in 2007. By that time, iPods had been around for quite a while, with the first version released in 2001. And by 2007, Apple had already released a number of different models, some discontinued, and some still being sold. There was the iPod Classic, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod shuffle, and iPod Photo. While Apple definitely had a secure footing in the market, competitors were starting to pop up – Zune had just released its first model of MP3 player and was about to release the Zune 80, Zune 4, and Zune 8 – competition for the iPod Classic and Nano lines. Luckily, Apple had something up their sleeve.
Now, the iPhone had already been on the market for about eighteen months in September of 2007. It was wildly popular, with lines hundreds of people long outside Apple stores on the day of its release. Part of its success was the touchscreen interface which, up until that point, really hadn’t been utilized by mobile phone manufacturers. Users were excited about a new, sleek, and attractive design that really seemed to be the future of technology – but there were some problems with the iPhone. For example, many of the people who bought them in the first few days of release were disappointed to find out that they couldn’t actually activate them – AT&T’s servers were just too overwhelmed to handle the number of new iPhone. Others were frustrated that the only way to actually use an iPhone was to purchase a bundled plan with AT&T – which meant leaving their own service provider and paying high costs to a new company that often didn’t have as reliable coverage.
