Ondrej Holzman The second week of September this year was the last to see the iPod classic. After the introduction of new products, Apple is uncompromising eliminated from its menu, and thus the last iPod with the iconic control wheel has definitively disappeared. "I'm sad it's ending," Tony Fadell says of his most famous product.
Tony Fadell worked at Apple until 2008, where he oversaw the development of the legendary iPod music player for seven years as a senior vice president. He came up with it in 2001 and changed the current form of MP3 players. Now for the magazine Fast Company he admitted, that he is sad to see the iPod end, but also adds that it was inevitable.
“The iPod has been a big part of my life for the last decade. The team that worked on the iPod literally put everything into making the iPod what it was," recalls Tony Fadell, who, after leaving Apple, founded Nest, a company specializing in smart thermostats, and at the beginning of the year sold Google.
“The iPod was one in a million. Products like this don't come along every day," Fadell is aware of the importance of his work, but adds that the iPod was always doomed, of course at some point in the future. "It was inevitable that something would replace him. Back in 2003 or 2004, we started asking ourselves what could kill the iPod. And even then at Apple we knew it was streaming.”
Read: From the first iPod to the iPod classic
Music streaming services are indeed here, although the end of the iPod was also heavily influenced by the development of smartphones, which now serve as full-fledged players and a dedicated device for playing music is no longer needed. The advantage of the iPod classic has always been a large hard drive, but it was no longer unique in terms of capacity.
According to Fadell, the future of music is in apps that can read your mind. "Now that we have all the access to whatever music we want, the new holy grail is discovery," Fadell thinks, alluding to the ability of streaming services to offer users music based on their preferences and moods. It is in this area that services such as Spotify, Rdio and Beats Music currently compete the most.
