With the iPhone line serving all of a user's multimedia and communications needs, Apple has had to retool its iPod Touch series and lower its cost to a more attractive price.
With a price tag of $199 and a 5-megapixel iSight camera at its rear, the fifth generation of the 16-GB iPod Touch has been released online and in Apple stores. That $199 price tag makes its the most affordable iPod Touch to date.
The 16-GB iPod Touch features a 4-inch Retina display and it's iSight camera can capture video in 1080P HD. The iPod has a 1.2-MP camera on its face, capable of accommodating FaceTime chats.
The newest iPod Touch comes in silver, glue, gray, silver and yellow. It delivers 40 hours of audio playback and can play eight hours of videos before requiring a two- to four-hour charge.
The new iPod Touch features iOS 7, but was said to be compatible with the incoming iOS 8, which was slated for a fall 2014 release.
With its A5 processor, the latest iPod Touch won't beat out the iPhone 5s and its A7 in processing power. The latest iPod Touch will, however, undermine the previous 16-GB iPod Touch, making a discontinuation or a price cut necessary for the preceding device.
The 32-GB version of the iPod Touch has been priced at $249 and the 64-GB version has been priced at $299.
Apple has reportedly sold approximately 26.3 million iPods from the device's initial launch in 2001, up to the fourth quarter of U.S. fiscal year 2013.
The iPod Touch's redesigned and cheaper prices comes after Apple's iMac experienced a similar price cut, earlier in June 2014, though the desktop computer's lower price came as a result of its use of economical components.
The latest 21.5-inch iMac was priced at $1,099. It featured a dual-core processor, clocked at 1.4-GHz, while its 21.5-inch brother and sister were constructed with quad-core processors and were clocked at speeds of 2.7-GHz and 2.9-GHz.
Unlike the other 21.5-inch iMacs, the newest version had a 500-GB hard drive. All models, however, were kitted with a solid 8 GB of RAM.
Apple's decision to place economy over performance in the latest 21.5-inch iMac likely came as a result of Intel's continued work on a new generation of processors. Intel's new Broadwell series of CPUs were expected to arrive as early as late 2014, but development of the processors could continue well into 2015 -- the new processors were expected to pack more power into smaller chips.
