LONDON – On Tuesday, I went into one of the Apple Stores in London. Browsing, the iPod Touch caught my eye. It’s a great looking, relatively powerful, iOS device. I thought it could be a useful piece of kit to have in my armory. Then, I asked a store assistant for the price.
Pricing Out Users
In the UK, a 32GB iPod touch costs £199. In the U.S. it costs $199. The new 256GB model costs £399/$399. (Does anyone need 256GB in an iPod Touch?) There are very few circumstances in which I could envisage someone paying that amount of money for an iPod Touch.
Despite the near-ubiquity of iPhones, there are plenty of use cases for the iPod Touch I can think of. They include devs testing beta versions of an App, giving it to teenagers or kids so they can access iOS games and tools when too young to have a phone, or a device to listen to music on whilst doing sport that isn’t your main phone. However, the price makes it hard to justify buying one for any of these, and many other use cases.
If Apple actually wants to keep selling iPods, it needs to make purchasing them a no-brainer. £199 for just 32GB of memory does not achieve that. How about £99/£99 for the 32GB version, rising to £199/$199 for a 128GB version?
Apple Does Not Even Care About The iPod Touch
There also seems to be very little justification for charging so much. I appreciate Apple makes premium devices. However, until May this year, Apple had barely focused on the iPod Touch and it had not been updated for four years. The camera is not bad – it’s 8-megapixels compared to 12 and 7-megapixels (main and selfie respectively) on the latest iPhones. The iPod Touch does not even feature on the front page menu of the Apple website, indicating exactly what kind of importance the company places on it.
Yes, it is powerful. The latest generation contains an A10 Fusion Chip. Essentially, the device has all the guts of an iPhone, without the modem for a carrier to connect to. But that surely means there are few extra R&D and production costs associated with it?
iPods are an iconic Apple product. However, the unnecessarily high price tag means that they now appeal to almost nobody.
absolutely you’re right the price of these iPods are really very high and now it’s becoming unaffordable for people who do hard work and earn money by doing hot jobs and studying apple should look after their prices.
The IPod Touch, as it is now, is not really worthy of caring about. Those niches outlined make up a very small percentage of people. It just doesn’t make sense the way its set up now. For the IPod Touch to be its own product, remove the cameras, lower the specs of the screen a bit to drive the price down, up the hard-drive space and battery life.
In other words, do all the things that would make an IPod its own distinct product, with the focus solely on the music. Being able to run games and apps should just be bonus.
Apple don’t seem to care about anything but their stock. Their products had seen a steep nose dive in quality in recent years with an ever rising price tag. Even their psuedo-ubiquity is in steady decline. It’s no wonder that after the tragically comical announcement of the Mac Pro we get this.
Don’t blame Apple for the UK’s disastrous tech taxation. And they just bumped the spec so how is that not caring?