Twenty-five years after the iPod’s launch, WIRED’s Steven Levy still calls it “the perfect thing,” arguing that no gadget since has matched its single-purpose joy. But from a business standpoint, the iPod’s real legacy is the discipline Apple showed in killing it. Levy notes that the iPod’s death was not one event: Apple quietly retired the classic model in 2014, ended the Nano and Shuffle in 2017, and finally stopped the iPod Touch in 2022—by which point the Touch was, in his view, just an iPhone without cellular connectivity.
The decisive moment came in January 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and described it as three products in one, including “the best iPod ever.” From then on, the standalone player was on borrowed time. Tony Fadell, who led the iPod hardware team and later worked on the iPhone, told WIRED that there was little hand-wringing inside Apple about the product’s fate. Jobs and Tim Cook both prioritized ruthlessly, Fadell said, and the discussion was about avoiding lower-value work as the iPhone and iPad took over the company’s growth story.
Fadell still agrees with Levy that the iPod’s disappearance left a hole. Its single, non-connected purpose meant users could enjoy music without the distractions of feeds, mail, and notifications. Today, communities on Reddit and Facebook rebuild old iPods with flash storage and Bluetooth, and apps can mimic an iPod Classic on an iPhone—but, as Levy puts it, you are still one swipe from everything else. The business takeaway, Fadell argues, is foundational: “The iPhone never would have existed without it.” The iPod helped turn Apple from a computer maker into a consumer electronics giant, even as its own success made its continued existence strategically unnecessary.