New iPod shuffle headphones, and other annoyances

Alex Kidman | Mar 12, 2009 11:01 AM

Alex Kidman warns that the new iPod shuffle will be as much good as a paperweight if you lose or break the headphones, and identifies some other reasons he is unimpressed.

There can be little doubt that Apple's fortunes were substantially turned around by the astounding success of the iPod line. Apple hit on a winning formula from day one of iPod sales. Not because they were first -- I'm sure Creative, amongst others, would want to have stern words with me if I tried to claim that -- but because they matched up an elegant and easy to use UI with canny marketing from launch time right up until the present day.

Apple's iPod marketing deserves special praise; if I say "iPod ad", you're more than likely going to immediately think of dancing silhouettes, and there's only a few ad campaigns that manage to embed themselves in the public's mind like that over time.

I like iPods, quite a bit, and own more than a few. Except, that is, for the iPod Shuffle, which has never really appealed to me, largely because I've always felt that it lacked the very essence of what makes an iPod special. Yes, it had the clever marketing behind it - but that's pretty much it.

Apple won out in the portable music space by delivering a player that was almost ridiculously easy to use, with a killer user interface. And it's that exact killer UI that the Shuffle's lacked from day one.

At a price point that's been well above similar screen-free players, I've never quite grasped why you might buy a Shuffle over one of the cheaper alternatives. Even the "shuffle" feature, that stacks the player with random tracks from your iTunes library doesn't seem that great to me, if only because the last thing that I want to follow up "Welcome To The Jungle" when I'm at the gym is Mozart's Piano Concerto Number 11. It just doesn't seem right to me.

So what, then, of Apple's overnight announcement of a "new" shuffle? Well, I've not had a chance to assess an actual physical unit, so I can only go off what Apple's currently hyping about the unit. And I'm still not sold. And here's why:

No buttons
Yes, it's a gimmicky feature designed for gym junkies who don't want to hit the wrong buttons. The big problem here is that at launch, only Apple's supplied headphones will work with it, and until third-party manufacturers start making compatible headphones of better quality, you're stuck.

Speaking of stuck, don't lose or break the headphones, or you're out the cost of a new pair, and your shuffle won't be good for much more than a paperweight until you do.

VoiceOver
On paper (or pixel - you are reading this on a computer screen, after all), this sounds cool - the ability to have track names and playlists read out to you to identify them.

It's not text-to-speech, though - online reports indicate that the text is generated on your computer by iTunes and is therefore presumably part of the transfer process from iTunes, taking up a small chunk of space as it does so.

It's therefore going to be dependent on the quality of your track naming, and how well iTunes can actually pick your tracks. Call me jaded if you must, but the fiftieth time it tells me that I'm listening to "Track 13", because iTunes itself couldn't identify my albums correctly, will be the fiftieth time I scream at it to shut up.

No branding!
As I mentioned earlier, the shuffle's success always felt like marketing over sensibility to me. As such, the reasons to buy a shuffle always seemed to be that it was an iPod, and recognisably so.

The new Shuffle lacks external recognition of this, looking more like a USB flash drive than anything else I can think of. How can you boast about your iPod when it neither functions like one or looks like one?

Price sensitivity
It's the easiest thing in the world to have a go at Apple over pricing issues, and I've written in the past about how I think some of those attacks are misguided.

The shuffle's going to be the exception to this rule, however, and it's not to do with exchange rates, or anyone else's players, either. It's Apple's own pricing that makes the new shuffles bad value (and, paradoxically, might just make the "old" 1GB $65 Shuffles seem like mildly good value). $129 will buy you a 4GB, no-screen, tethered to one set of headphones, logo-free iPod shuffle.

$199 (only a $70 difference, and that's if you can't find a slight price bargain somewhere) will buy you an 8GB iPod Nano. With screen, UI, video, games, proper controls and your choice of headphones at all times. Which one makes more sense?