The iPod is over ten years old and in gadget years, that’s positively haggard. Apple has unofficially mentioned a plan for a transition in the product line and there are rumours aplenty suggesting the iPod's imminent death.
The iPod Classic still uses a hard drive in the age of flash memory and hasn’t really moved on connectivity-wise since its release. For this reason – and with Amazon nipping at the heels of Apple with cloud-connected hardware – the iPhone 5 is highly likely to use Apple iCloud servers for music and videos.
That will mean valuable memory is freed up as most of your favourite tunes and flicks can be deleted and downloaded again as if they were apps.
So on 4th October we could be saying hello to a brand new iPhone 5 with a whole new take on iTunes (over the air updates, fingers crossed), while we bid goodbye to the old faithful iPod Classic and iPod Shuffle. It's going to be an emotional day.