IPod classic

iPod Classic

iPod Classic 6th generation
Manufacturer	Apple Inc.
Type	Portable media player / Digital audio player
Retail availability	2001-2014
Discontinued	September 9, 2014
Media	5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 60, 80, 120 or 160 GB hard drive
Operating system	1.5 (1G, 2G) 2.3 (3G) 3.1.1 (4G) 1.2.1 (4G Color) 1.3 (5G) 1.1.2 (6G) 2.0.5 (6G 2009)
Display	1G-4G: 160 x 128 px, 2 in (51 mm), monochrome LCD Color: 220 x 176 px, 2 in (51 mm), color LCD 5G-6G: 320 x 240 px, 2.5 in (64 mm), color LCD
Input	1G: Scroll wheel 2G-3G: Touch wheel 4G-6G: Click wheel
Connectivity	1G-4G: FireWire 3G-6G: USB 2.0
Power	1G-2G: Lithium polymer battery 3G-6G: Lithium-ion battery
Related articles	iPod Shuffle iPod Nano iPod Touch iPhone
Website	Official website (archived)

The iPod Classic (stylized and marketed as iPod classic and formerly just iPod) is a portable media player created and formerly marketed by Apple Inc.

There were six generations of the iPod classic, as well as a spin-off (the iPod Photo) that was later re-integrated into the main iPod line. All generations used a 1.8-inch (46 mm) hard drive for storage. The "classic" suffix was formally introduced with the rollout of the sixth-generation iPod on September 5, 2007. Prior to this, all iPod Classic models were simply referred to as iPods. It was available in silver or black replacing the "signature iPod white".

On September 9, 2014, Apple discontinued the iPod Classic. The sixth-generation 160GB iPod Classic was the last Apple product in the iPod line to use the original 30-pin iPod connector and the Click Wheel.

iPods with color displays use anti-aliased graphics and text, with sliding animations. All iPods have five buttons and the later generations (4th and above) have the buttons integrated into the click wheel — a design which gives an uncluttered, minimalist interface, though the circuitry contains multiple momentary button switches. The buttons are:

The iPod's operating system is stored on its dedicated storage medium. An additional NOR flash ROM chip (either 1 MB or 512 KB) contains a bootloader program that tells the device to load its OS from the storage medium. Each iPod also has 32 MB of RAM, although the 60GB and 80GB fifth generation, and the sixth-generation models have 64 MB. A portion of the RAM is used to hold the iPod OS loaded from firmware, but the majority of it serves to cache songs from the storage medium. For example, an iPod could spin its hard disk up once and copy approximately 30 MB of upcoming songs into RAM, thus saving power by not requiring the drive to spin up for each song. Custom firmware has also been developed such as Rockbox (up to 6G - 6G requires emCORE) and iPodLinux (up to 5G) which offer open-source alternatives to the standard firmware and operating system.