Two months after Apple has ceased producing the iPod Classic, they are now selling for up to four times their original price. Production of the Classic stopped in October, and since then, the unrivalled storage capacity (the 16GB Classic holds double the amount of songs of any iPod currently in production) has made the Classic a smash Christmas hit in spite of it lacking Apple promotion.
The move to pull the Classic from production was made by Chief Executive Tim Cook, who said that Apple no longer had access to the component pieces of the iPod and would therefore require a redesign which Apple chose not to do.
The move away from large capacity hardware is in large part a response to subscription software such as Spotify, which means large storage capacities such as 120GB Classics are viewed as less desirable and less marketable. This shift towards familiar products is not new or unique to the iPod, however; history students will be familiar with the idea of historic recurrence, and philosophy students should familiarise themselves with Nietzsche’s idea of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return). Nietzsche’s argument can be summarised as positing that with an infinite time and a finite number of possibilities of things that can occur, event will recur again and again.
We can see Nietzsche’s ideas reflected throughout history, and particularly in economics where we see trends and vogues reflecting the finite possibilities for new products.
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