The Price of an iPod Touch is Unjustifiable

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.

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