Apparently, if you’re one of the…many? Few? people who still carry around an iPod classic, it’s time as an official product may be coming to an end. This isn’t terribly surprising as all electronic devices eventually reach the end of their officially supported lifecycle, and the company that manufactures them decides it’s no longer in their best interests to provide parts and service for said device. For some things, the support can continue for a very long time; the original Atari 2600, originally released in 1977, was supported all the way into the 1990s. Apple even has a support page for ‘Vintage and Obsolete Products.’

I’ve never owned an iPod, but it, along with iTunes that was released later, revolutionized digital music. It was by no means the first digital media player, but it was certainly the most important. I do still have many (MANY) legacy electronics hanging around, below is the pocket color TV I had all the way in the early 80’s! It still works, but of course gets no signal since we’re on digital broadcasts now.

One other thing I should mention: In the article linked above, the author mentions the carrying capacity of the original iPod (160 GB) and says that’s one of the reasons he keeps his. While it is true that t had more capacity than current models, that is due to the fact it uses an actual spinning, mechanical hard drive – similar to what you would find in your PC – as opposed to solid state storage that has no moving parts, like a flash drive. The problem is, those mechanical drives are prone to failure and impact, and we moved away from them for portable storage pretty quickly.

Either way, the moral is if you still have an original click-wheel iPod, you should hang on to it.