Inside Apple’s new iPod touch

Apple announced the new, low-cost version of the iPod touch last week. It’s got 16GB of storage and sports a 5-megapixel iSight camera, and costs only $249.

The higher-capacity versions of the iPod touch came down in price, too, such that the 32GB model is now just $299 and the 64GB is now just $349. That’s down from $329 and $439, respectively.

The price cut is in response to a long decline in iPod sales, as the world moves onto smartphones. iPod sales have dropped by roughly 50 per cent since 2008.

So anyway, the folks at iFixit purchased one of the new iPod touch players, pulled it apart, and found that Apple had made no changes to the already very old technology, other than reducing its memory capacity to get the price down.

Here’s what iFixit concluded about the new device, after peeking inside:

We delved inside Apple’s “refreshed” device and found the same components we’d seen in Touches of yesteryear . . .

So, how do you create a refreshed product?
1. Take an existing product you’ve been selling a couple of years
2. Swap the flash memory to a lower quantity, let’s say 16 GB
3. ???
4. Profit

I don’t know what they were expecting to find. The same chips as in a current generation iPhone? The thing about the iPod touch is, it’s devolved into a device you buy for kids, so they get to use apps and do some WiFi-based messaging (especially now that the cheap version has a camera) without running the risk of them racking up a huge phone bill.

Would your ten-year-old nephew care that his shiny new iPod touch has the same A5 microprocessor that appeared in 2012 iPods?

Mine wouldn’t. He’d just be happy to have an Apple device, after the Nokia Lumia 620 I gave him for Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, the Lumia is a great device for kids, too, but as far as I can tell it lacks the Apple brand cachet in the school yard.

The Australian Financial Review