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Why Steve Jobs Loved the IPod Shuffle (wired.com)
"Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod?" remembers Steven Levy. mirandakatz writes
Apple recently announced that it's officially discontinuing the iPod -- sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music. At Backchannel, Steven Levy offers a requiem... The Shuffle, he writes, was unique in that it was an iPod stripped down to a single basic function -- and, as Steve Jobs told Levy in 2005, it made the perfect [cheap] gift for inculcating young kids in the ways of Apple.
"I will go buy them one of these for 100 bucks apiece," he told Levy, referring to why the Shuffle was an especially appropriate gift for his daughters, six and nine at the time. "They'll probably lose them in 60 days. But they'll get into it this way."
Jobs called the Shuffle "every bit an iPod -- just a different iPod," saying that the definition was simply "a great digital music player." (Though later he'd say that creating a radically smaller Nano was still "a huge bet.") Levy remembers the Shuffle as "one of the company's most fun products ever...stripped down to the one feature I adored," writing that he loved how "algorithmic serendipity" approximated a genius deejay (or "the 'Hand of God' chess move that Deep Blue used to confuse Garry Kasparov into thinking the computer had trespassed into realms formerly limited to brilliant humans.")
I bought my first mp3 player in 2000 -- an Archos Jukebox 6000 which weighed three quarters of a pound. Anyone else have fond memories they want to share about the iPod, the Nano, the Shuffle, your old Newton -- or your own first mp3 player?
"I will go buy them one of these for 100 bucks apiece," he told Levy, referring to why the Shuffle was an especially appropriate gift for his daughters, six and nine at the time. "They'll probably lose them in 60 days. But they'll get into it this way."
Jobs called the Shuffle "every bit an iPod -- just a different iPod," saying that the definition was simply "a great digital music player." (Though later he'd say that creating a radically smaller Nano was still "a huge bet.") Levy remembers the Shuffle as "one of the company's most fun products ever...stripped down to the one feature I adored," writing that he loved how "algorithmic serendipity" approximated a genius deejay (or "the 'Hand of God' chess move that Deep Blue used to confuse Garry Kasparov into thinking the computer had trespassed into realms formerly limited to brilliant humans.")
I bought my first mp3 player in 2000 -- an Archos Jukebox 6000 which weighed three quarters of a pound. Anyone else have fond memories they want to share about the iPod, the Nano, the Shuffle, your old Newton -- or your own first mp3 player?
What about ATRAC players? I was playing that game in 1993 as I was lugging around my Sony MZ-1.
http://www.minidisc.org/part_S...
My first MP3 player was some sort of iRiver chunky thing with a hard drive. It was clunky and big and unattractive.
Now I just use my 5 year old LG phone.
So I went from being far ahead of the game to just using the cheapest old thing I can find.
Mostly random stuff.
Apple could modify and update the Air Pods, removing the need even for a any device to stream from.
A couple of taps to control. Just like the shuffle with a reasonable memory for shuffling a favourite play list.
If the shuffle was that great...
There's still a market for music players that aren't phones. Streaming and the issues with iTunes have definitely hurt the iPod, but there's still a market for such a device. One interesting project is building small devices that aren't phones and sync with streaming services to download songs that are later played back offline. If you can get enough streaming services on board, it could definitely be successful.
They at least give you the first one for free to get you hooked.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Goatse link...
It's a different world one lives in when one laughs off ones kids losing 100 dollar gifts.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Sure, if you want to instill "money is no concern", as is mandatory for Apple fans, then make $100 dollar gifts to kids who don't value their devices enough to not loose them. Fucking idiots.
When I went to buy a mp3 player suitable for running there were several choices and all of them were two times cheaper. But two colleagues told me how they used theirs for several years and they were going strong. I was very skeptical, because I use Linux at home and this meant that I would have to switch to Windows just to transfer music. The other negative was that I couldn't switch songs in a convenient manner (no display). Some years later I think it is one of the best purchases I ever made. I am running in very cold weather, in very hot weather, fog, rain. I have never experienced any issues. The physical controls are a very big plus and the layout is perfect.
Right now as I type this, an iPod Classic is playing next to me, hooked to portable speakers. Inside it is a 3rd party board with two SDXC slots, each containing a 512GB card. The board treats them as JBOD volumes and concatenates them automatically into one for the iPod, which - while still running the original Apple firmware - now holds 960GB of audio.
In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done. If it gets smashed or dunked in a lake, the SDXC cards can be recovered and put into another iPod.
I used to have a 300 CD carousel made by Sony. It was the size of a pizza oven, and switching between CDs took ages. Now those CDs are all ripped into ALAC and sitting on the iPod. Same with all my audiobooks, and an enormous backlog of podcasts, because why not? I've got room...
That leaves about 300GB, which I have stuffed with backups, since the iPod makes a decent external drive.
Added bonus: It's so old, no one tries to steal it!!
Who needs lossy cloud music, that vanishes the instant you travel out of cellular range? The iPod is still the one essential music listening tool for me. Long may it survive, until third party battery suppliers all lose interest and the warehouses run dry.
I bought a 60$ android tablet that lasted for a year. The thing that makes something cheap is not only how much it costs but how long it lasts. People seem to forget this.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Obviously the Diamond Multimedia RIO 300. 18 songs @ 64kb 20min ish transfer over Parallel. Was happy for the RIO 500 upgrade!
sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music
That's right, because there are no other manufacturers of digital music players, and there aren't thousands of other players to choose from.
If you choose to lock yourself into the Apple ecosystem, you choose to limit how you do things.
It's the lack of this attitude from Apple that will be it's eventual downfall. Maybe thats the wrong word, I don't think they'll ever go away entirely. But they'll start to lose out to competition again just like when they fired Jobs. It was his attitude to customers and products that brought success. He was clearly about making money, but he also cared about the products and the ideas behind them. The tech world really is worse off without him.
I agonized on the decision between the Archos and the iPod, but made the right choice. I bought one of the first iPods to fly off of the shelves. Those Archos things were heavy, and as I recall, had a non-intuitive, click-button based interface. The iPod––you could grab it without looking to hit 'next song' or whatever.
The iPod replaced radio in my car (no ads, and I had already ripped my 300+ CDs with N2MP3, the first Mac CD ripper. This was long before iTunes had the ability to rip CDs. Remember the ad campaign: "Rip, Mix, Burn"?, and the RIAA's fit over their misinterpretation of those three words?
In use, it was funny to watch people's reactions to the iPod when they'd ride in my car. "Here, it's intuitive, and it's got about 40 albums-worth of music on it. Try it." They'd get confused and have to be told to scroll the wheel and to click the button. Within two minutes, however, they always 'got it' and were hooked. Well, except for my PhD advisor, who hit play with random engaged, and as luck would (not) have it, a song from John Lennon's Shaved Fish came on – "Woman is the Ni..." The title scrolled across the screen. Questions. I had a little explaining about how John liked to write smash-mouth lyrics, and explained the meaning of John's lyrics on this one... I told him to hit "next song" and he was OK after that. Man – 40 albums and that one song comes up when I'm giving my advisor a lift! Anyway, he bought an iPod very soon after.
I've still got an 80 GB iPod lying around here somewhere. I hear that they can handle installation of up to a 256 GB HD, which would be plenty for my entire music collection + books-on-tape. 65 days-worth of music might as well be a radio station, but with no ads. :-) But without a car, that project is on hold.
was a Palm Pilot. Was a great device, then moved to a Palm Treo. Used that until the software stopped being supported, then begrudgingly moved to Android.
Found in Android some of the same fun and development that had been around in the Palm days. Have an iPod somewhere on my desk...never use it.
I spent a year in Germany, and all over the place were portable CD players that could also play MP3 files (meaning 10 albums on one CD). EU had VAT, so I figured I'd just pick one up when I got back to the States – for cheaper.
WRONG. Every electronics store back in the US would tell me that no such thing existed, and that I was stupid. Yeah, whatever, pimple-boy. I had to wait almost two years for the iPod to come out. It was another year or two before CD-player boom boxes that could play MP3 CDs would appear in the US. The first ones for car-stereo replacement all had terrible problems with skipping, or 'blanking', due to insufficient size of MP3 data buffer and/or inadequate mechanical isolation.
Had a little portable Sony MP3 CD player until the iPod came out. It skipped. Then I got an iPod––it never skipped. It doesn't take much memory to buffer 3 seconds of MP3 data, but Sony was too cheap to go that route. Just another reason that I have not bought Sony in almost 20 years.
I had a Diamond Rio MP3 player in 1998, before the ipod was even thought of. Steve Jobs didn't invent the MP3 player, he just marketed one specific version very well. In the UK a lot of that marketting was down to the BBC pretty much giving free advertising to Apple and rewriting the history of MP3 players.
My first MP3 player was a Rio Chiba 128 MB, a tiny little thing that had a built-in belt clip, and was even smaller than the iPod I went on to replace it with. It was powered by a couple of AAA batteries, and could store around 60 songs; easily enough for a few albums to listen to on the way to work.
Thing is, I didn't buy the Rio Chiba - I actually won it in a prize draw on the "MyCokeMusic.com" website, not long before that disappeared forever. It was the first time I'd ever won anything of any value. Many thanks to Coca-Cola for that!
Sure, 128 MB isn't a huge amount of space for storing music, but it certainly beat carrying around a CD player and a pack of discs. Or (*shudder*)... tapes...
I eventually replaced it with an iPod 60 GB (before they began referring to them as "iPod Classic"), which fell out of use as soon as mobile phones with built-in MP3 players and decently-sized SD cards became available.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
There were flash memory based onces before the cd ones. The cd ones were popular because you could fit more songs on them. When the price of flash memory went down things changed and flash became popular again. Some had mini hhd drives but they broke easily.
$100 for a fucking mp3 player that wouldn't even let you choose songs? A 512 mb Sansa Express was about $25 at the time IIRC, was a similar size and shape (though not brushed aluminum, admittedly), had an sd micro slot, and actually let you choose songs. The Sansa Clip Jam (8gb) is the current iteration, $28 on Amazon right now.
I do remember ATRAC cds working quite well on my sony CD player.
Ah, my 1st gen iPod shuffle and 1st gen iPad -- I can bear to chuck other gadgets away but not these two.
In case anyone is wondering what use is the 1st gen Shuffle -- it holds one long AIFF track of a binaural beats meditation audio. Which is somewhat ironic because it means I never use the shuffle setting.
My first music player was a MobiBLU cube. A 1" cube with 1 Gb memory. Played for a whole day on one charge. Had a three line display and multiple play modes. It died after two years of very heavy use - battery went out. Shortly after, MobiBLU left the US market.
>"sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music."
Seriously? As if there aren't many dozens of other MP3 players out there for many, many years, that are also better and cheaper? Sandisk Clip perhaps?
"sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music." Yeah because the only reason people carry a phone with them everywhere is so they have their music library with them.
I love my Shuffle. I'm probably in the minority here, but I still use my first generation 512 MB iPod Shuffle every week, and the original ear buds still work great. This may be one of the last Apple products which was made like an older Apple product . . . it just worked and it was built to last. For over ten years it's been my music player for working out, and on an arm band you don't notice it's there. Tough, truly great design, minimal not for the sake of being minimal but because it made sense to the function of the product. This was a truly high water mark for Apple before it went down the road of disposable products.
Make love, not reality television.
Rockin 6gb in my pocket since iPod was just a twinkle in Steve Job's eyes.
Pretty sure mine still going strong if I actually charged it.
Wrote "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" and "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness," among many other great tech books.
This article is poppycock. Steve Jobs loved the ipod shuffle because he got millions of dollars from selling it. End of story.
bought used, good quality, though i cannot get used to the interface or the lack of modding.
Sure it only supported compact flash with an external kit you had to dock into it with, but it would allow me to play all my mp3s I had to download at school. There was even an Armband that you wore it on while exercising if needbe....i think.
All i remember is running miles with that thing blaring music into my ears that I couldn't get into another form factor at the time. Now? I wish I had a mini bluetooth mp3 player so I don't have to carry my phone around with me while running. It rains allot and water+iphone=bad.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
As a runner, the shuffle is still my device of choice. I can set it up to have playlists for books, podcasts and music and easily switch between them without breaking a stride.
I keep my phone tucked away in a belt to protect it and that makes it tough to change playlists. The iPhone software insists on using separate apps for Music, Books and Podcasts - switching between them is a much more difficult proposition that involves taking the phone out, unlocking it, selecting the new app, finding the playlist, then locking it and putting back.
I tried using Siri to switch playlists but it struggles with my accent (northern england), wind noise and generally being rubbish.
I'm going to stockpile Shuffles buying as many as I can. The alternatives (SanDisk etc) all look a bit big and flimsy in comparison.
At the time the shuffle was released, Chinese players that did the exact same thing that were, give or take, the exact same size existed. The only material difference was build quality and price. The Chinese one being cheap in both aspects.
For a device that someone is apparently supposed to lose in 60 days, the Chinese model was the right buy, and the shuffle was a Fool's purchase.
Of course, I have never owned any Apple equipment, save for an Apple keyboard and an eMac I bought for next to nothing used so I could figured out the basics of OSX in case someone with a Mac ever asked me questions (which they do, but I didn't really need the experience, since the questions are usually things like "What does this 'Mail Server' thing mean?"
No, we had those in the states as well. They just stopped selling once the iPod and it's various clones came down to a reasonable price point.
The end game is simply that the Apple Watch is going to end up eating the feature set of the Shuffle. You'll stream data to the watch (or use limited on-board storage), and play music/etc wirelessly through bluetooth wireless phones.
I expect you'll see this in the next watch refresh.
No. Go fuck yourself. Mind your own business.
Came out a year before the IPOD, and had a bigger hard drive. I thought it sounded better and the shuffle worked better than the IPOD. It wasn't terribly difficult to upgrade the HD to 20GB. The menu was a little clunky to find a specific song because there weren't many lines to display, but it worked well to just fire up an artist.
It was larger than most but it was the same size/shape of many of the cd players so a bunch of the accessory bags could be reused.
Oh yeah, and no need for itunes, I really hated that software.
I had a nice RCA player that took compact flash cards, so you could swap them out. I bet it still works but you needed to use WMP to transfer the files so they could get encrypted into some goofy DRM format. That one ran off of AAs so was great for road trips as a kid. Later on I got an iRiver which was a great anodized aluminum player with a capacitive strip to interface with but it had a mini hard drive in it so eventually it broke down. Nowadays I mostly just use my phone, but I do have an old shuffle around for listening to music while doing something laborious with power tools when I'm afraid I might damage a phone.
As a runner the Gen 6 Nano was perfect. It clipped right to my shorts, held more than enough music for being out for an hour or two, and it had a screen so I could see what playlist I was trying to select.
The iPod shuffle was very expensive for what you got. Cheaper and better music players included a display and didn't require iTunes.
My first music player was a Rio Riot. Weighed - I have no idea - at least a few pounds. Had an internal platter-based HD for storage (20GB). When it spun up, the whole device developed a gyroscope inertia that you could feel as you moved it. monochrome LCD with a 2" screen. Built-in FM tuner which frankly I miss out of the newer players. Big battery - lasted about 20 hours on a single recharge. I still have it, and it still works, but I don't use it that much - I replaced it with a gen1 iPod (60GB) which I'm still using.
He didn't *invent* the things he supposedly invented. He just figured out how to make already existing things successful.
And Jobs could do that because he *was* a genius at choosing the features to leave out.
Any engineer is aware of tradeoffs. Everything you add to a project has *some* undesirable consequences. But even so the temptation to hit every conceivable point on the punch list is overwhelming for most people.
Where most people would be struggling with that basic impulse, Jobs would play 11-dimensional feature chess. Case in point, the original iPod touch. It didn't have a speaker or hardware volume control. Any normal person would have put *some* kind of a speaker. It didn't make sense; what did it save, maybe $0.25?
But it wasn't something that made a difference in sales; they sold millions of the things, which meant the choice translated into millions more in profit. But still, a speaker and hardware volume controls are things are something you'd want occasionally. Remember with the first gen touch there was briefly a thing where iPod users would unplug their earbuds and offer their jack to another iPod user?
Then Jobs introduced the second gen iPod Touch, and it had a speaker and hardware volume controls. And people who shelled out $299 for the first gen Touch wanted them, and after all the second gen was cheaper at $229. Result: you ended up spending $528 over the course of two years instead of $300.
And that's the difference between genius and mere cleverness: genius is thinking ahead, and also in other dimensions that a clever person isn't considering. That makes genius surprising at the time and obvious in retrospect.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Still using my second-generation iPod shuffle every day. I had to replace the battery - which is a procedure I hope I never do again - and the Chinese replacement doesn't last as long as when the iPod was brand new.
I was waiting for The Source to discount their remaining units, however seeing they only have three colours remaining I'm thinking they're not discounting them at all. I guess I'm off to buy one from the local store later today.
What's funny about the iPod shuffle generations is that after... let's call it "customer feedback" about the third generation model, Apple reverted to the design of the second generation for their fourth model.
It's too bad that Apple decided to discontinue the iPod Shuffle. Nothing they have can replace it. Certainly not their stupid overpriced watch. If Apple's idea of replacement for their $50 iPod shuffle is a $370 Apple Watch with $160 AirPods they're completely disconnected from reality. That's more than 10 times as expensive.
I hate watches and I hate the feeling of having something attached to my wrist. I also hate in-ear "pods". If someone gave me a free Apple watch and AirPods, I'd sell them right away without even opening the packages.
#DeleteFacebook
And get off my lawn!
#DeleteFacebook
Then Apple better come out with a $50 Apple Watch otherwise it's not an appropriate replacement.
#DeleteFacebook
Anyone who would click a random link that's just an IP address deserves worse than goatse.
Apple recently announced that it's officially discontinuing the iPod
No, they aren't. They are discontinuing the Nano and Shuffle, but the Touch is remaining (for now). The article linked even limits itself to just the Nano and Shuffle.
Especially when you look at your status bar and see /goat/ as part of the URL and still click on the link.
#DeleteFacebook
I remember it like yesterday. I bought the nano for a fortune, lovingly loaded it with my favorite jogging tunes, then went out for my first run. First day of owning my first apple product. It was glorious.
Sweated like a pig when I jogged. Sweat ran down the cord into the 3mm audio jack and the nano quit. Apple has a built in detector for such a purpose and told me tough luck for sweating like a pig. Guess Apple couldn't put a simple o-ring around the jack instead of a fancy water detector. F U Apple.
Last Apple product I ever owned. Bought a dozen cheap Chinese mp3 players. None of them ever broke.
...the Steve Jobs name dropping and worship end?
It was all the rage back in '05.
Today's kids just don't know how to dance.
My first mp3 player was back in 2000 when I was in college. It was a Rio Volt100 portable cd player that also played mp3 cds. I really wanted a proper mp3 player, but this thing served its purpose well. It had a wired remote control with a headphone jack at the end of it, so I would throw it in my backpack and still be able to plug in my headphones and use it. Plus, it had 120 seconds [!!!] anti-skip protection for cds, so, you know... I could jump around without fear of my cds skipping.
Back in '02 or so I got an MP3 player big enough to rip a CD to with a little room left over.
I think it was like 24MB or something.
I may still have it in my junk drawer.
Kasparov touched the wrong piece in a game with Judith Polgar and, with reference to Maradona's hand assisted goal, called it the "hand of God".
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
I purchased mine in an Apple Store as I was Christmas shopping two iPod 20GBs for family members.
I was skeptical that I would need an MP3 player as I had Winamp and I was almost always in front of a PC.
The iPod Shuffle was just a little white USB stick on a lanyard. Turned out to be the gateway drug for me.
Since that day I've owned two iPods, an iPod touch, three iPhones, one iMac and one Macbook Pro.
I love my iPod classics - they live in both of my cars, and I take one every time I fly. You can't beat a dedicated device for music.
I'm still hoping, one day, that Apple will throw caution to the wind and reboot the iPod classic with flash memory, bluetooth, and a lightning connector.
C'mon Tim! Make a new iPod classic!
I remember going through an old backpack and finding a shuffle and wondering why I hadn't used it in years. Then I remember, iTunes. And then I remember that iTunes is the main reason I don't buy any apple product.
Who gives a shit about this?
The same Christmas that the first 2 gig iPod Nano came out, I really couldn't fathom paying its sticker price ($200 I think). Then saw that Best Buy was selling another flash MP3 player that also had 2 gigs: Sansa SanDisk, with blue OLED display. It didn't have the flashy color screen of the Nano, but the functionality was on par:
1) could make playlists and mark favorites (on-board)
2) used a single AAA battery that would last over 20 hours of continuous play
3) built-in microphone for taking notes/recording classes
4) tunable FM radio
5) MOST IMPORTANTLY , I could upload my playlist to another computer which the iPods could not do
I used it for about 7 years, but very sadly left it on a plane. If anyone by chance ever found it, you're welcome!
the iPod shuffle made some sense back in the day, at least for me, because it while it was twice the price of the cheap Sandisks I had nothing but trouble with those. Constant sync issues and the like. I'm guessing the chips running cheapo MP3 players, like the ones in cheapo ethernet cards & bluetooth dongles, have standardized and just work now. My bro's an old school PC tech who got out of it when the pay really went to hell and he's always shocked when things work the first time.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio. I liked the idea but never did anything with it. I gave it to a friend and ordered an Archos Jukebox 6000, which I really liked (mainly because of the capacity and sound quality). I loved the fact that it simply mounted as a hard drive and didn't require an app of any kind of the host computer. It was a simple, handly, and very reliable device. It went to Iraq with me in 2003. It was special. It could take me to a different place. I remember finding a quite place up forward next to some guns on the ship, where I'd get away from the noise and ships company (Sailors). I'd sunbathe there and for some reason nobody bothered me there. Finding any quiet or privacy on a warship is very difficult! Then later, after we were helicoptered to "the beach" (the nasty little port of Umm Qasr) the Archos came along and provided a little escape when I could take a break and not have to focus on what was going on around me. The unit took a lot of abuse, held my entire music library at the time. I even had a folder full of SOMA-FM music thanks for longtime friend Rusty Hodge at the station. It always seemed weird and kind of decadent to be able to lie down someplace and be taken away from all of the stuff going on, to the sound of your music that relaxes you, or gets you going. Later, when I got home, I used it in the rental car as I drove up the west coast, Visiting places and places that I hadn't seen since I was a kid. Just composing this message is taking me back, yet again.I also brought along a Sangean ATS-909 portable AM/FM/Shortwave radio, and that was great too. It allowed me to listen to British Forces Broadcasting Service, VOA and even Kuwaiti FM stations.
Here is another suggestion. Have an MP4 player that can play video music tracks, is small enough and also can be connected to any iPod playback system (like in a car). In the player, have an YouTube downloader, as well as a playlist organizer. That way, one can download all the songs one likes, organize it in a playlist, and either watch it while sitting somewhere, or listen to it in the car. It would leverage the iPod compatibility of a lot of players, while enabling people to enjoy what they download.
Most people have upgraded from flip phones already
Including children whose parents are willing to pay for a phone and a pittance of minutes and texts for the child to use to arrange a ride home but not for a huge data plan? After smartphones became common among adults, children remained a big user base for dedicated media player appliances (such as the iPod shuffle and iPod nano) and small Wi-Fi-only tablets (such as the iPod touch).
and internal storage up to 128 GB is available.
At a substantial upcharge.
A quality smartphone is the best portable music player ever made.
I agree, if money is no object. But I was under the impression that money was still an object, particularly for cash-strapped parents. "You can have a smartphone when you're old enough to have a job to pay for it, and in this state, that's 16."
I thought ATRAC was proprietary. What software did you use to compress?
I still have fond memories of minidisc.
On the other hand, I found a nano in the street. Run over and dented. Scuffed and sanded by asphalt. Plugged it in and it worked like new.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So, I just want to say, it is important for some of us to still have the option to have non-wifi/bluetooth devices. I work on submarines and it is frustrating to lose your music because your device can't connect to the internet when your hundreds of feet below the surface and in the middle of the ocean. It is also useful for those spaces we're not allowed to enter with devices that can do wifi/bluetooth or camera. Companies are looking to super connect everything they forget about the small groups of people who can't have super connected devices. Maybe we're just not important, that is why we didn't have any x-box ones onboard.
Off the top of my head, here's how I've experienced portable music players changing:
1. Cassette Player ("Walkman")
2. CD Player
3. MP3-capable CD player, mini-CD player
4. Proprietary medium player (mini-disc, etc.)
5. MP3 player with internal storage, some expandable (Diamond Rio, Creative Nomad, Archos Jukebox, Apple iPod, Sandisk Sansa)
6. Smartphones (using local media collections) & surviving MP3 players in the market
7. Smartphones (using streaming media collections) & re-emerging MP3 players in the market (Fiio, Apple, Sony, many other audio-focused companies)
But then smartphones began to change themselves. They kept getting BIGGER and people no longer felt comfortable needing to lug around a phablet on bike rides, runs, or in their pocket while just walking around the office/house. So, "wearables" hit the market as a solution to wanting both LARGE phone screens and portability. Most people think "smartwatch" and "fitness tracker" when it comes to wearables, but the iPod Shuffle (being part of the "iSuite") might have been one of the first modern wearables.
Opinion
I think we're going the wrong direction with the balance of of the size of the smartphone and the utility of wearables. Today's newest smartwatches are now coming with GPS/GLONASS, app libraries, and direct cellular connectivity and as a result they're getting VERY large. We don't want to carry around phablets while exercising, so we're taking other small devices and making them larger, separating out sub-devices for processes that were previously relegated to smartphones (The Mighty for Spotify playlists, Pebble Core for GPS/alerts, etc.).
But instead of a person owning 3 different GPS trackers, 4 wi-fi chips, and 3 cellular transmitters, why aren't we just focusing on further shrinking the smartphone has a hub for all the processes while developing a separate device to make the smartphone SEEM bigger? One such device is being kickstarted right now (Superscreen). This concept allows you to use your smartphone via a tablet-sized proxy.
Thus, you can get a physically small smartphone, carry it everywhere, connect everything you want to it (BT headphones, smartwatch, etc.) and when you want the LARGE form factor for reading, you pull the "big screen" from your portfolio, coffee table, or desk. Additionally, all of those other devices will need to charge less frequently because your phone is the one doing all the heavy transmitting.
My first MP3 player was a Samsung YEPP. It had 64MB of memory but it came with a "headphone remote" that let you not only change the volume and pause playback but also jump tracks and rewind and fast forward. Now it's 2017 and my earbud remote only lets me pause and resume. I miss that old head phone remote on the Yepp. I don't understand why headphone controls are so limited today.... I don't want to constantly be going into my pocket on the subway. It's annoying....
Steve Jobs said $100 was a good price for a device your kid will lose in 2 months.
Is that really what the 'Hand of God' in chess means? In chess, this refers to players breaking the rules,
e.g. repositioning pieces after a move is completed.
So, is this article saying that the iPod Shuffle was breaking the rules of pure shuffling and nobody was noticing? Or is the author referring to some kind of magical intuition?
Kriston
I got one as a piece of vendor swag. The process of installing iTunes was bad enough I gate it away without using it once.
I still use my little rectangular clip-on original iPod shuffle, even with an iPhone of 100,000x the computing power nearby. It sits in the case with my noise-canceling headphones, is ready when I take them out, does exactly the job I need and doesn't use up the battery of the phone. There's something to be said for exactly the right amount of technology at just the right place for what is needed - and it's always in "airplane mode"!
Rock-it. With a battery bigger than an ipod. Took 30 GB 2.5" drives.
it made the perfect [cheap] gift for inculcating young kids in the ways of Apple.
Accept this gift and your journey to the dark side will be complete!
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Though competitors' devices can play music purchased from iTunes Store since DRM was dropped in 2009, virtually no non-Apple device can play videos purchased from iTunes Store. Videos still use FairPlay digital restrictions management, which is compatible only with Apple devices and x86-64 Windows PCs running the iTunes application. And the only remotely pocket-sized x86-64 Windows PC that I'm aware of is the 5.5" GPD Win laptop.
No, we had those in the states as well. They just stopped selling once the iPod and it's various clones came down to a reasonable price point.
I returned to the US in the Fall of 2000. There were none to be found, at least in my extensive search at the time (in a major US city).
Sony SonicStage, I still have some of the mp3 tracks I had burned to CDs with it, so having a disc that only worked on some sony players wasn't much of an issue.
I've bought exactly one iPod in my entire life. When I was overseas in Iraq last decade, the MP3 player I brought got squished between an armor plate and a rifle magazine.
So I needed a new source of tunes. Because everyone was raving about these ipods, I decided to buy an ipod nano at the PX. It was somewhat expensive, but I had the cash. Great fit and finnish. While having the same capapbilities and storage as the old player, it was 1/3 as thick and far more solid construction, and weighed a lot less. I could put it in my arm pocket and not notice it. The interface was very smooth and responsive.
Then everything went to shit. First comming home from the PX, the local apple douch abushes me to congradulate me on my first apple purchase, and then told me I should put the included apple sticker somewhere conspicious to signal my new loyalties. He said we should hang out now, and I should throw out all my other electronics for Apple shit. Umm no. Get the fuck away from me you fucking creep. You're the unit bitch. no one liked you, everonye knew you as the unit toolcase.
Then I plugged it into my at the time windows machine with winamp(at the time, still extant), winamp saw the iThingy and all of a sudden decided it could sync to it. and BAM, like that, the ipod, which was new, found a non-apple product trying to sync to itself, so to automaticly bricked it self. So here I am thousands of miles from home, with my internet a 15 kB/s internet connection, and now I am expected to download iTunes to unbrick this, and sync my music. What? Really. Not happy. I paid almost $200 for this thing just to be told how I use it.
The answer is no. Apple products are for toolcases.
That's correct, the Rio Karma was the best damn audio player ever, especially because it played flac files.
Nice reminder that I still have it, think I'll install a SSD and start using it again.
Like many off I started off with a classic ipod, then a touch, and for years I listened to music on my iphone.
Now the iphone sounds ok for music but there is room for improvement.
A few months ago I succumbed to the temptation of buying and end of production Pioneer high res music player (XDP-100R if you want to google it) for a good price at Amazon. It is in essence a standard Android device without a phone module but with a proper audio circuit instead. I have to say it sounds awesome on better headphones. It is noticeably better than the iphone's audio circuits (and most other smartphones I think) for music playback.
The flipside of the coin is the annoyance of bringing 2 devices but it is a lot of enjoyment for music lovers.
FYI there is an interesting affordable high res audio player now on Kickstarter. If I didn't have the Pioneer yet I might have backed it.
The disadvantage - well in use it is largely ok but in comparison the user interface of the original ipod was just brilliant. It only did music playing and did it beautifully simply.
yeah but could you remove the battery when it dies and replace it with a new one?
I have an 80gb iPod. Decent audio and works when the phone batteries die.
I run rockbox so I never have to use iPod protocols to get music on it.
Sometimes I use it as a hard drive.
I'd love to have an SD card version of it, like my 1st mp3s player. That was a frontier? that took CF cards up to 128mb and ran on a AA battery.
The Shuffle? Why? It started and finished as an overpriced under powered piece of tech that could be replaced for less than $10 with a generic SD Card player.
The original iPod that was discontinued a few years ago allowed you to put a 40 year music collection in a package that could fit in the shirt pocket. For the "iPod Classic" there is a thriving after market industry upgrading to better battery and replacing the hard drive with a higher capacity SSD drive. It all depends on what you want; just something to play music while jogging a half hour a day or something that can carry all your music with you on a multi week road trip.
NRRPT/RCT