Apple iPod Hi-Fi

» see apple.com/ipodhifi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The iPod Hi-Fi was a home-stereo speaker built around the 30-pin iPod dock connector. Steve Jobs announced it at a Cupertino town hall on February 28 2006, called it audiophile-grade, and put it on sale the same day at $349. The product was the size of a small toaster oven and weighed about sixteen and a half pounds. The intended use case was simple: drop your iPod in the dock on top, and turn the iPod Hi-Fi into the main music source for a room. It could also run on six D-cell batteries if you wanted to take it on a picnic.

The press response at launch was lukewarm. Reviewers praised the sound and the bass response, but the price was hard to justify against the existing third-party speaker docks from companies like Bose and JBL. The Bose SoundDock was $299 and considered the benchmark. The iPod Hi-Fi was heavier and more expensive, with no FM radio and a remote control that only handled basic playback. By late 2006 the device had effectively disappeared from Apple's marketing surface.

Apple discontinued the iPod Hi-Fi on September 5 2007, less than two months after the iPhone launched. The 30-pin dock connector survived for several more years, but the iPod-Hi-Fi-as-room-stereo concept did not. Apple did not return to the home-audio speaker category until the HomePod almost a decade later. The iPod Hi-Fi remains one of the cleaner Apple hardware misfires of the Steve Jobs second era.

By 2006 i was on TTNet broadband and finishing computer engineering. The audio setup at home was a pair of cheap PC speakers plugged into the desktop tower, and an MP3 player that was not an iPod. A $349 Apple speaker dock was not the audio purchase a Turkish engineer was about to make in 2006. The Apple-accessory market in Turkey at that time was thin enough that the iPod Hi-Fi probably never officially shipped here at all. I only learned about its existence years after it had already been discontinued.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

Mechanically the iPod Hi-Fi was a sealed acoustic enclosure with three drivers behind a single front grille. The cabinet was machined from a single block to minimize vibration, with the iPod dock cut into the top surface. Power came from an internal amplifier driving the drivers. There was no internal radio tuner and no display. The only interface was an Apple Remote that talked to the dock via the iPod itself.

The connectivity story was simple. You dropped your iPod into the top dock and the unit acted as a charger plus a speaker. If you did not have an iPod, you used the 3.5mm aux input on the back. There was a mini-TOSLINK optical input as well, which fed into the same DAC. That was the entire input surface.

~ the funny part ~

Steve Jobs spent significant stage time at the launch event arguing that the iPod Hi-Fi was a real audio product, not a docking speaker. He compared it to Bose and to reference monitors from KEF. The marketing was openly aimed at audiophiles. The actual buyers turned out to be Apple-store impulse purchases by people who already owned every other accessory in the store. The audiophile community largely ignored the product, in part because the iPod itself was outputting compressed MP3 audio that defeated the point of a high-end speaker.

~ the day it died ~

The September 5 2007 discontinuation came alongside a broader Apple lineup refresh. The iPhone had launched in June, and the iPod nano and iPod touch were about to be Apple's main focus. The iPod Hi-Fi did not fit anywhere in the new lineup. Apple did not publicly comment on the discontinuation. The product was just quietly removed from the store. The remaining inventory turned up at clearance prices for a while, then on eBay for years afterward.

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