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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Discontinuing the Shuffle makes sense. But I'm surprised that they don't just update the Nano to support their current services. It does have a screen.

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I would sooner buy a Shuffle than a Nano (I have neither). For the exercise use case, Shuffle is a third the weight of Nano, a third the price, smaller form factor and has a clip for your clothes. If all you want to do is shuffle your playlist while you run for an hour, it's perfect. I never understood the people who run with a half-pound smartphone strapped to their arm.

It's not that I don't want something smaller. It's that I don't want the hassle of configuring and updating one more thing.

If I had an "iPod shuffle" app on my iPhone that would just keep the shuffle updated with music wirelessly, I'm in.

I'm guessing the apple watch is the replacement. It tracks cardio and can independently play music stored on it via bluetooth.

I'm afraid you are right, but, boy what a price hike for the use case!

Ah, discontinuing the Nano because it competes with the watch does seem likely.

I have a Shuffle, and your comment describes exactly how and why I use it.

I'm sure this allows them to drop a lot of legacy. Keeping the shuffle means continuing to support a non-Darwin based OS [1] and any legacy protocols it used. It's continuing to be a shrinking market, so I can't imagine investing much r&d to add support for current services.

Another poster asked why not use Apple Watch guts to update the Nano. I'm sure for similar reasons including the hardware used in the watch is likely significantly more expensive than what's in the nano, now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo

The marketplace for these devices is probably shrinking as smartphone penetration increases. The BOM for the ipod touch is probably similar enough to the iphone for them to justify keeping it around.

The market for them were already hurting back when Featurephones were a thing, so i am surprised to learn they still exist.

Heck, featurephones with music capabilities were probably what drove Apple to make a phone in the first place.

The iPod Touch is still incredibly popular among kids since it doesn't require a cellular contract. Given that most schools and places have wifi an iPod Touch is great on the budget.

Considering how much Apple is focused on Apple Music, I'm not surprised. Both the Shuffle and Nano don't support the service, only able to sync content within an iTunes library.

It would've been great to see Apple Music support added to either device but I imagine there's many reasons why they couldn't/wouldn't spend the resources doing it.

Insignificant number of users/purchasers probably. How many people don't have a smartphone with a music service on it? And out of the people that would prefer a device like the Nano for certain activities (e.g. gym) how many need a new version? I still have the first Nano that had a video camera and it works as well as the day I bought it.

> And out of the people that would prefer a device like the Nano for certain activities (e.g. gym) how many need a new version?

And for those who do, Apple would probably prefer to sell you an Apple Watch with 2GB of music storage than an iPod Shuffle.

Maybe those expensive wireless earphones could even keep a playlist in memory and then you can go for a run without the phone..

> How many people don't have a smartphone with a music service on it?

More than six billion?

Optimistic they will be introducing a high-end iPhone, made from scarce parts. Through price anchoring, the Touch will seem like a bargain low-end screen device.

What "scarce parts" are you going to use to build a phone?

For Apple, nearly anything new is scarce at their scale. There's a lot of speculation that a new high-end phone will be added to the lineup to allow them to introduce technology that can't be scaled as fast as Apple would need.

See http://www.macworld.com/article/3207552/iphone-ipad/apples-r...

Assuming "current services" includes Apple Music, the Nano does not have wifi.

This seems like the strongest explanation. Apple has a greater chance at upselling someone to a subscription service if there is wifi or cellular data. That said, they could have added wireless connectivity to the Nano maybe.

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