★ “Apple Starts To Wind Down The “iPod” Brand”

BusinessInsider:

Apple’s new iOS 5 software for iPhones, shipping this fall, has many additions, but appears to have one notable subtraction: The music app is no longer called “iPod” — it’s just called “Music.” There’s a separate app for “Video,” as on the iPad and iPod touch.

Apple is probably mostly trying to unify the experience across all of its iOS devices, so playing music and videos is the same on all of them. Simpler, less confusing. It makes sense. But it’s hard to overlook that Apple is also probably starting the inevitable wind-down of the iPod brand.

I mentioned this in my blog post covering iOS5 yesterday but I think Dan is incorrect in his analysis. I don’t believe “iPod” is going away but I do believe that the “iPod App for iOS” is being sent away because the iPhone is larger than iPod. I have enjoyed the fact that the iPod Touch has a “Music” app along with Movies, Photos, etc. and was just used to seeing the iPod app on my screen on the iPhone. In my blog post I mentioned:

Also, iOS 5 has a new iPod app that was redesigned. We saw it for 5 seconds during the keynote when Eddie Cue bought a Bruno Mars Song. It looked ugly. We’ll see but it’s not like I have much of a choice if I don’t like it. The new icon was overdue as the iPod icon on iOS 4 looks like an old iPod Classic which Apple would like us all to forget about. Really, why did they make it look like the iPod classic from the beginning?

The iPod Classic icon was always odd to me but, in 2007, the iPod classic was the iconic silhouette you’d see and KNOW it was an iPod without a doubt. The nano, mini, shuffle and touch were never iconic enough to be an iPod when you removed the details.

The music icon is a shift but not meant to signal the departure of “iPod” as a product. I firmly believe we’ll have another decade of iPod because not everyone wants a cell phone contract with their MP3 Player and I know MP3 Player is such a dumbed down word but I still am asked by family members, “what’s the best MP3 Player right now?”

The best MP3 Player is iPod.