It’s been three months since Apple discontinued the iPod Classic, and it seems the high-capacity, mechanical hard drive wonder is still in high demand, bringing a premium from third-party resellers on such sites as Amazon and eBay.
The 160-gigabyte variant is on offer for $495.99 from third-party sellers Amazon, for instance, nearly double its original retail price of $260. The premium pricing was first noted by The Guardian.
More than 3,000 iPod Classic devices have reportedly been sold on eBay since October, with almost 2,000 currently up for auction on the site.
The 160GB iPod Classic, the largest capacity iPod ever produced by Apple, was always popular with iPod users who preferred to carry their entire music collection with them, instead of storing it in the cloud. Current iPod touch models top out at 64GB of storage, while the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad mini 3, and iPad Air 2 offer 128GB of storage.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said the reason for the iPod Classic’s demise was that the company could no longer obtain parts to build the device, and sales numbers didn’t warrant a redesign with new components.
“We would have to make a whole new product,” Cook said. “The engineering work to do that would be massive. The number of people who wanted it is very small.”
The 1.8-inch mechanical hard drives used in the iPod Classic were sourced from Toshiba, who has discontinued its entire line of 1.8-inch hard drives
