Apple needs to kill the iPod Nano!.
Recently; Apple updated their iPod line. The results were pleasing in respect to the flagship model of this product, the iPod Touch, which was updated internally to hold an A8 chip as opposed to its older brother which only had an A5. With the addition of the iPod Touch being put into the A8 chipset, it now means that there is no more products developers can get their applications onto, that still runs off an A5 chip that Apple sells. The TV third generation still holds an A5 chip, and Apple still sells this, but developers can't, officially speaking, place their apps or modify the TV; officially speaking.
The good news on the iPod Touch however does not extend any further; like down to its, cheaper, baby brother the iPod Nano. The Nano was my first iPod (5th gen) and my first step into the Apple world and ecosystem so this product holds a sentimental soft spot in my heart. When this new lineup was launched, there was a great deal of disappointment for the iPod Nano and its lack of, anything. Aside from the new colours, the iPod Nano is the previous version in a different case. Nothing about the internals of this product have changed and this means that now for £129, a three year old product is looking very expensive for the specifications that it gives.
What the Nano is today
Apple is clearly looking for what the iPod Nano is used for these days. If you want music, what product do you by? Apple recommends the iPhone 6 and Music and over the last 5 years, the move from having music on a separate device to having music in the same device that holds your podcasts, photos, and that is on your person all of the time seems only logical. For your kids, you're going to buy the iPod Touch. It's way cheaper than an iPad and is only £30 more than the Nano and you get the full Apple familiarity with it too; 4-inch touch screen, camera and you're able to put on all the applications they they want to install and play on your phone.
So where does the iPod Nano come into all of this? The Nano was the replacement to the iPod Mini and now, over a decade later, the Nano appears to be a product that should have been killed off in the most recent update of the iPods. The Nano only has Bluetooth capability so you can't connect it to Wifi, you can't have Music songs on it and you can't Airplay to your connected speakers. The Nano, in it's current display is behind with the times and Apple needs to kill it.
Can Apple kill the Nano?
The short answer here is yes. Apple bundles all iPod sales in its quarterly report into the 'Other' category and made $2.641 billion in sales in the 2015 third quarter report. This is a measly 8% of what the iPhone alone made in the same quarter, standing at $31.368 billion. As the former figure also encompass' Watch sales, the iPod Nano sales have to be an incredibly small part of this figure.
For those Nano die-hard fans out there, there will not be a great loss to the market. As Apple killed off the iPod Classic they can kill off the Nano and hold no real repercussions. The sales made from the Nano are going to be heavily trumped by the iPod Touch and as seen by the figures, they are greatly trumped by the iPhone. When it comes to upgrade your, now ageing iPod Nano, does the idea of being able to update through Wifi and having an operating system that is actively managed.
The Nano's failings
Once upon a time, there was a whole team of people working on the iPod Nano and so when the 6th Generation iPod Nano came along in 2010, which was incredibly small and held a touch screen the whole iPod OS was updated. At this time, the we had iOS 4 and the iPod had a similar look and feel to the current iOS. This iPod OS software updating was carried forward with the 7th generation iPod Nano when iOS 6 was king. We now have iOS 8, soon to be iOS 9 and with the enormous graphical update that iOS 7 brought, the iPod Nano is looking very much behind the times. Why?
The team has gone to work on a more shinier product. The iPod OS team were moved to work onto the Watch but were not moved back, ready for the update to the iPod line in July. This mean that the iPod Nano still looks like it is running the iPod version of iOS 6 and the Nano nows look like the most backdated and oldest product of all the 'iOS' Apple devices rather than being, what it is, the most recently updated. There is nobody left on the Nano team and this time, Apple has launched an updated product that was the same product as before; just in a shinier box.
When the iPod was originally launched, it was a closed system. The only thing that could be put on their was music, from iTunes. The iPod was a closed system as the only platform to develop for within the Apple ecosystem was the Mac. There was no iPhone to develop applications for, nor was there the iPad. Today, the iPod Touch runs iOS 8; not a thinned down and specially formatted to the device version of iOS 8 like TV does but the full and complete iOS 8. This is a broad step from what was originally the case when the iPod was introduced. The Nano, realistically, is the only device that still holds true to this, developers are out, way of working.
The Nano's potential
After quite a slanderous post about the iPod Nano. The shocking fact is that the Nano has a huge potential. The unfortunate truth is that the Nano has a great level of potential. During the iPods lifetime, the rise of single board and smaller computers have come to the market. The Raspberry Pi, launched in February of 2012, has sold over five million units and has been adapted to bring the next generation of computer programmers into the world as well as being used as Virtual Private Network Servers and many more uses. These Linux based systems allow for multiple uses and for a device that only costs less than £30 is a great way to turn devices into more complex computing devices. Such as the vending machines that tweet when a user makes a purchase from them.
The Nano has this potential. Take the computing for the Nano and allow for multiple devices to built around this. Apple is one for being able to have smaller and smaller chips that house, what is essentially a whole computer. Notably the 2015 Macbook and the Watch; both of which have everything running the device very compacted. Although if Apple was to launch a new product they would be looking for the highest market but taking the insides of the iPod Nano and creating an Apple friendly single board computer would be a market that was no massive seller for the average consumer or something that required its own separation in the quarterly reports but if Apple controlled the chips and circuitry of those devices that more than happily worked with one's HomeKit system. One of the current issues that HomeKit is so delayed on being a major release and working how Apple originally announced it was security between the devices, a customers Wifi and their Apple Device. Most of these devices are connected via Bluetooth but Apple is not happy with the security that Bluetooth LE gives. A major issue here is that Bluetooth was never designed to be secure. If Apple controlled the bulk computing from a hardware point it could, as we've seen, control the software that the devices run and how they are able to interact with other devices that are also connected to the HomeKit system.
The Nano also has potential to work with larger static machines. Those self-checkouts that appear to have less intelligence than a dead human checkout operator are usually an entire PC inside the checkout but will automatically open the till software on startup. If Apple were to launch their own small computer that had the potential of running a single program on boot this would mean that resources could be better fuelled into this single use program as opposed to run a bulky operating system. Apple is already doing this with the Watch where the whole computer is on a single chip and running watchOS so a 'nanoOS' doesn't seem that far fetched at all. The name still suits. Small computing but for larger operations with a computer the size of a Raspberry Pi fits the name of Nano perfectly.
The potential of the Nano as a computing device is to be able to build hardware to work with the limitations already put in place. The Nano doesn't have Wifi, we have USB dongles for that. The Nano doesn't have a camera, we have cameras for that. When you go to the theatre and the venue scans your ticket to allow you to get in; these are usually using iPod Touch if they are not already cable linked up to a computer in some older theatre venues. Having a Nano would reduce the size required for these scanners and would provide a product that could be moulded to each use that it was required for; rather than having a device where you need an Apple ID to put applications on, only from the iOS App Store and these applications cannot be use specific unless a company has entered into the specialised developer program for Apple.
Apple launched Swift, their own new programming language at WWDC of 2014. They then went on to make this open source at WWDC of 2015. Clearly, with an open source language, a single board computer which is capable of running applications built in Swift is something that Apple is looking to achieve with the language and if their not; this is certainly a possibility with an Apple happy, Swift running device where adding a cheap touch screen or a barcode scanner is intuitive to put together.
In Summary
Apple knows that the iPod market is slim which is why they are pushing for the iPod Touch as the flagship model of the iPod lineup. They also know that Music is a big part of peoples lives and with more and more adopting to the platform, the service is going to grow. Apple also know that they are capable, have the resources necessary and the expertise within their staff to create a product that is more modifiable than any Apple product that has come before it. Apple stopped selling circuit boards when they stopped selling the Apple I. Maybe it is time that they went back to this model and allowed a new batch of Apple happy programmers to enter into the world. In this age where everything is in the cloud, the iPod Nano is dead and Apple are the only ones that can put the product to sleep. Apple are pushing for Swift to become a dominant launguage in the programming world and a single board computer running like the iPod Nano could do is, I think, something worth investigating.
When talking about billions of dollars, the short scale has been used. One billion is equivalent to 1,000,000,000.
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