Not only discontinued but there are reports to the effect that the remaining stock was pulled from the Apple Store shelves before there could be a run. The bahstids.
Things to be missed about the Classic:
1: Capacity, of course, and that was local storage – the WiFi or cell network can have an outage or be out of range, or maybe you just don’t want to use up your dada cap, but as long as you can charge the battery you can still access your music
2: Clickwheel = can start/stop/skip forward and back/repeat/change volume w/o having to look at a touchscreen
3: It’s a straight media library/player, it doesn’t try to do 115 thousand other functions, some half-arsedly. Sometimes you just want to listen to your albums or podcasts, you do not need your exact planetary coordinates to do so.
In the world that used to be, this would have been an opportunity for someone to enter the market with something along those lines; but alas, that alternative may be done in by the worshippers of (grandiose musical fanfare) The Cloud!!(loud cheering crowds). Big IT are not just betting on the Cloud, they’re actively working to make it so you’ll *have *to park your 100GB not in an iTouch or something similar but in (grandiose musical fanfare) The Cloud!!(loud cheering crowds) – their Cloud, natch.