While speculations were swirling wildly until last week that Apple would officially roll out the iPod Touch 6th Generation in September to join its latest iPhones, the American tech giant pulled off a major surprise by launching its latest media player on July 22.
It was a launching that almost came out of nowhere that not even Apple insiders were privy about it and were caught really off-guard.
Months before the official launching of the Apple iPod Touch 6th Generation, reports, rumors, and speculations about its features, specifications, among other details were already running around plenty on the internet.
Apparently, while most of the rumors and speculations were on target with the features and specifications of the latest iteration of Apple’s media player, practically everyone was not aware of the July 22 launching date.
When the device came out, Apple only has one thing to say about the iPod Touch 6th Generation – it is the company’s best iPod Touch yet, notes IFixIt.
Worth the wait and the money
The Apple iPod Touch 5th Generation was released in 2012 so when word got around about the American tech giant working on the 6th iteration of its iPod Touch, everyone was pinning their hopes that the refreshed version will finally bring forth major and important changes to the device.
Users obviously recall that when the iPod Touch 5th Generation was released, it only offered minor refresh or updates from its predecessor, the iPod Touch 4th Gen, dismaying a number of its fans.
However, with the three-year gap from the release of the iPod Touch 5th Gen to the unveiling of the iPod Touch 6th Gen, everybody was expecting that the new media player device would come with groundbreaking improvements to make it worth the wait and perhaps the money too.
The design of the Apple iPod Touch 6th Generation remained almost exactly this time, but the company added new color variations to the mix and took out the strap option. The latest iPod Touch now comes in Silver, Gold, Space Gray, Pink, Blue, and Product Red, details 9to5mac.
As it launched before the iOS 9 was officially rolled out, the media player device came out with the iOS 8.4 on board and comes along with the Apple Music app.
Contrary to rumors that the iPod Touch will have a larger display similar to the iPhone 6 line launched by Apple last year, the iPod Touch 6th Generation came out with the same 4-inch display featuring the same 1,136 x 640 screen resolution.
But the device now sports an 8-megapixel camera similar to the one featured on the iPhone 5S. The camera can shoot up to 120 frames per second Slo-Mo video at 720-pixel. It’s an improvement from the iPod Touch 5th Generation which came out with only a 5-megapixel rear-facing snapper.
Market price
The base model of the iPod Touch 6th Generation, which is the 16GB variant, is priced at $199, which is quite affordable enough.
The 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB variants come with the increments from $50 to $100 from the previous model, with the high-end model of 128GB priced at $399. So generally, the high-end iPod Touch 6th Gen is more expensive than the current price of the iPhone 5S.
Before the launching of the iPod Touch 6th Generation, there were previous reports that Apple will no longer launch a new iteration to its iconic music player line because iPod Touch sales have significantly declined over the years.
In fact, during the first quarter of 2014, the company sold just over six million units of the device, down from 12.7 million units that were shipped on the same quarter of the previous year.