People Are Buying Classic iPods for $900
Apple officially shelved its beloved MP3 player the iPod Classic back in September, but since then a growing number of nostalgists with deep pockets have begun snatching them up on eBay and other…
Apple officially shelved its beloved MP3 player the iPod Classic back in September, but since then a growing number of nostalgists with deep pockets have begun snatching them up on eBay and other outlets, often at more than twice the retail price.
Popular among buyers is the massive 160GB model, which holds around 40,000 songs. Apple used to sell them for around $250, but hundreds of new and used ones are currently being hawked for much more than that on eBay, where ongoing auctions have people bidding over $400 for a piece of history. In all, over 5,000 160GB versions have been sold on eBay, where they’re being billed as “vintage” and “rare” — with one boxed player going for a whopping $899.99 back on Nov. 29.
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On Amazon.com, a company called Kailone Tech is selling new 160GB classics for $492.88, while used ones are going for around $250. If you’re pining for some sweet LCD screenage, there’s even a first generation 5GB version listed at around $200.
The iPod, introduced in 2001, fell to the wayside earlier this year in an age of music-playing smartphones and streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, where people are paying for access to music rather than ownership of it. Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a pretty simple reason as to why they had to kill the classic storage device: “We couldn’t get the parts any more,” he said at a conference in October. “We would have to make a whole new product… the engineering work to do that would be massive.”
The company continues to sell the iPod Touch, Nano and Shuffle. None, however, come close to the MP3-storage capacity of the Classic, with a 64GB Touch costing $299 in stores.
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