Apple today cut prices of its iPod touch as sales of that device and others in the iPod lineup have plummeted over the past year.
The iPod Touch, which resembles an iPhone but lacks the hardware to make or take cellular phone calls. On the Irish Apple Store this morning the 16Gb model was unavailable but its 32Gb and 64Gb models were repriced at €259 and €309 respectively.
Sales of the iPod line – once a major revenue contributor – have been falling for years. In the March quarter, the most recently reported, Apple sold 2.7 million iPods, a decrease of 51% from the same period the year before.
iPod revenue totaled $461 million, off 52% from the first calendar quarter of 2013, and accounted for just 1% of Apple’s $45.6 billion in the period. The year before, the iPod generated 2.2% of all Apple sales.
As recently as the first quarter of 2011, the iPod line accounted for nearly 13% of Apple’s revenue.
Some analysts have urged Apple to ditch the iPod because it’s a no-growth business, but Apple has not hinted that it would follow that advice. It has, however, acknowledged the shrinking sales. “I think all of us have known for some time that iPod is a declining business,” said CEO Tim Cook in January during an earnings call with Wall Street.
The iPod has fallen on hard times as customers have shifted their music libraries to other Apple devices, notably the iPhone as well as the iPad.
Apple debuted the iPod touch nearly seven years ago, and for some time the handheld music player – which also was able to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi and run iOS apps – was touted by both then-CEO Steve Jobs and industry analysts as the company’s answer to growing sales of netbooks, the cheap, small portable PCs that for a time were the darlings of the computer business.
The iPod price cut is the latest in a string of moves by Apple to make its hardware affordable to more consumers. Last week, Apple launched a new entry-level iMac priced at €1,129. Two months before that, Apple quietly refreshed its MacBook Air line, dropping prices and offering a sub-€1,000 Macbook Air to the public for the first time.
The current iPod Touch devices will be able to run iOS 8 when it is released this autumn.
Computerworld
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