According to rumors coming out of Japan, the Cupertino-based company is expected to launch a new version of the iPod soon. Here's why
An iPod Touch 7 coming soon has been talked about for over a year. Now, however, it would really seem that Apple is going to make it and could put it on the market by the end of 2019 or next year at the latest. Among the technical features that the seventh generation of iPod could bring there could be the abandonment of the Lightning port in favor of USB-C, already adopted on the latest iPad Pro. All this, however, at the moment is only a series of rumors.
How will the iPod 7
To report these news is the Japanese blog Mac Otakara, which in turn cites information from some suppliers of Apple. The iPod 7 according to Mac Otakara would not yet be at the stage of Reference Design, that moment in the development process of a new product in which the technical characteristics have already been decided and lacks little to production. USB-C, then is also a feature that could be as much confirmed as denied. At the end of 2017, for example, there was talk of the possible integration of Face ID on iPod 7 but then the news fell into oblivion. The last version of the iPod is quite old: it dates back to 2015 and is still on sale at a price of 239 euros for the version with 32 GB of internal storage. It's basically a depowered iPhone 6 without the phone part, with the same A8 processor and the same 8-megapixel camera.
Why is Apple launching the iPod 7?
Currently, it's Apple's cheapest device for listening to music on Apple Music, and since Apple is increasingly turning into a multimedia service provider as well as a hardware manufacturer, it seems sensible that it would want to upgrade the entry-level device to access those services. The iPod Touch 7 could then mount a more modern processor (A11 or A12) also to better support the recently released iOS 12 operating system. With an affordable device with updated hardware and operating system, then, Apple Music could gain a lot of new users and keep them for a long time to come.
As for the abandonment of the Lightning port and the adoption of the much more popular USB-C, there is instead to say that more than one market analyst is convinced that this will affect not only the next generation of iPods but, gradually, all other Apple products, iPhone included.