Dive Brief:

• BlackBerry will stop making the BlackBerry Classic phone, just 18 months after launch.
• The phone, which featured a phyical keyboard and BlackBerry's OS, was aimed at longtime BlackBerry customers.
• The device's predecessors once were the de rigueur phones for executives.

Dive Insight:

Sigh. We've learned to live without real keypads, with lousier battery lives, with "better" smartphones that offer thousands of apps -- but there's only one real BlackBerry. It has a keypad, and an easy thumb-controlled scroll, and the hardcore user probably just uses it for email and texting no matter what BlackBerry slaps onto it. And soon, that BlackBerry -- for the few remaining loyal users, really the BlackBerry -- will no longer be manufactured.

BlackBerry knows this move will give some people a case of the sads. "Sometimes it can be very tough to let go," Ralph Pini, Blackberry's COO and general manager for devices, wrote in a blog post. "For BlackBerry, and more importantly for our customers, the hardest part in letting go is accepting that change makes way for new and better experiences."

Indeed, most BlackBerries now run on Android, and some don't have keypads at all, which seems like a disruption of the natural order of things. But BlackBerry, which had 20% of the global market phone share less than a decade ago, is a shell of its former self. According to statistics portal Statista, BlackBerry's market share for Q1 of this year was 0.2%.