Slashdot Mirror
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?
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Rubbish, quite frankly. First off - he never claimed to invent it, in fact he showed competing flash-based devices such as the Rio at the launch speech. Second, comparing a 5Gb hard drive-based machine to a 32Mb (or 64Mb later I believe) Diamond Rio that could barely hold an album is silly. Remember the original marketing - 1,000 songs in your pocket? None of the other carry'able portables could do that - this is what Taco missed with his now-legendary "less space than a Nomad" comment. The Nomad was..err..20Gb from memory (could be wrong) but it was CD player-sized, not just fittable into a trouser pocket.
Next up is the interface. It's hard to remember now, but this was a head and shoulders above everything both in the way you chose a track and also in the way you interacted with your computer. iTunes was good in those days. Ripping a CD and putting it onto your portable player was made easy for non-technical people, and the store later made it easier still.
There are reasons it became so dominant.
$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.
>"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?
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.
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.
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.
I have my iPod shuffle every time I go to the gym.
It clips onto my shirt tail...and is light, and easy.
I don't want something large and bulky I'm lugging around while working out.
I have my beer gut for that...and I'm trying to get rid of that too!!
I'm not married to Apple music players, I've just enjoyed them for years....what are the other small, lightweight easy to use mp3 players out there?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.