Are IPod and ITunes doomed?   Some think so.

"Taking a page from such journalistic luminaries as John Dvorak, the Observer was out there last week generating page views with a story on the coming iPodcalypse.

Sales are declining at an unprecedented rate. Industry experts talk of a ‘backlash’ and of the iPod ‘wilting away before our eyes’. Most disastrously, Apple’s signature pocket device with white earphones may simply have become too common to be cool.

First of all, I don’t have the sales records thought BBC was able to get a hold of them.

"On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

The report warned against simple characterisations of the music-buying public that divide people into those that pay and those that pirate. "

The only thing I can add is the fate of the IPod and ITunes are linked - if one dies, the other also suffers.  I honestly don’t know if there’s anything for Apple to worry about or not…at the end of the day not much has changed in the last year - but people do seem to be dissatisfied with ITunes 7, and I have noted it runs very slowly on the Windows platform.