Originally Posted by chas_m

Really? Can you name any?



Yes, let's look at the iPad, shall we?

Announced: January 2010
Shipped: April 2010

IPad 2 announced and shipped: March 2011

Interesting calendar you have there, most of us would call that 11 months but it's only six months in your world ... hmmm.



Really? I guess I should tell my two-year-old iPad that it can't support iOS 5.0.1 (which it is currently running), and that it can't run the latest apps (even though it does) and that Apple doesn't support it anymore (hint: wrong). The news will also come as a shock to my 2007 Black MacBook which seems to THINK it can run Lion just fine, four years after I bought it, and has no problem with all but the most-high-end latest applications. Must be a delusion ...

If you'd written "four years" instead of six months, I think you could make a case. But six months? That's just plain disingenuous and I assume you must know this.

To Grappler: your iPod Touch dates from 2007. Don't know if you've looked at a calendar lately, but that was a while back. We don't know how you've treated it in the meantime, but even assuming you have been as gentle as a museum curator with it, the battery is, well, you know, a battery. It degrades and dies out eventually. All batteries do this, so I'm a little surprised you apparently weren't aware of this.

Luckily for you, the battery is degrading right at the same time as you should be buying a newer one so that you can take advantage of the advanced OS the later versions run. Again, maybe the iPod Touch is your first-ever experience with technology, but the idea that computer-based, internet-dependent, software-oriented electronic devices have a short lifespan is not exactly new, and certainly not unique to Apple. Ask any Android owner who bought a 2.x Android device, they got SHAFTED compared to you.

Even better news, the newer ones are significantly cheaper and yet far more powerful. There is plenty of precedent for this in everything from cars to TV sets. Again, I'm surprised you haven't noticed this before.

In short, high-tech toys have a relatively short lifespan of about four to five years. In part this is due to the rapid evolution of technology OUTSIDE the maker's control, such as the internet. In part, this is timed to coincide with the normal lifecycle of the battery. And in part, this is how capitalism works. It's also how innovation happens. Somebody had to build the Model A in order to create the Model T, if you know your history.

PS. To answer the question you posed in the thread title, no I don't think the iPod Touch is getting phased out, though they didn't update it as they generally do in September. Nobody here can say for certain, but my guess would be that they took a year "off" so to speak and will bring out a much-updated iPod Touch sometime this year, hopefully along with some refreshed iPod models as well.