As part of its iPhone press event, Apple announced today that it would sell a new version of its iPod Nano media player, with an 8 GB version for $129 and a 16 GB version for $149. Engadget reports that the Nano will also get big icons for its touch screen, replacing the grid of 4 small icons in last year"s model. A new 2 GB iPod Shuffle, with the same case design as last year"s version will also be sold for just $49. Finally the iPod Touch will be sold starting October 12 in black or white colors with the 8 GB version selling for $199, the 32 GB version for $299 and the 64 GB version for $399.
According to Engadget, the company also announced today that since the original iPod launched in 2001, it has sold over 300 million iPod devices worldwide. Even in the past year, where Apple has seen massive growth in both its iPhone and iPad businesses, it still managed to sell 45 million iPods between July 2010 and June 2011. Cook claimed that it took Sony 30 years to sell 220,000 units of its famous Walkman cassette players. The iPod still remains the biggest portable music player device with a whopping 78 percent share of that market.
Cook also said that its iTunes music store currently has 20 million songs available to download for iPod, iPhone and iPad users along with the PC and Mac platforms. 16 billion songs have been downloaded from the service since its launch.
There have been rumors that Apple might discontinue making the iPod Classic, with its large hard drive. Again, this is just a rumor for now but we will update this news post if anything definite is announced.
Update: While the iPod Classic has not been canceled there will be no real update to this part of the iPod family.