“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?” Steve Levy recalls for Wired. “By then — January 11, 2005 — I had staked my own claim to iPod expertise, having written a Newsweek cover story about Apple’s transformational music player, and I was writing a book on it.”
“My biggest obsession was the shuffle function,” Levy writes. “And now Apple had introduced something that stripped down the product to the one feature I adored. I was charmed but baffled. Was this thing that looked like a plastic rendering of a Wrigley’s pack of gum — no clickwheel, no screen, no hard disk — really an iPod?”
“‘An iPod is just a great digital music player,’ Jobs told me. ‘It doesn’t have a wheel, it doesn’t have those rectangles and circles. That’s not the issue. The issue is we want to make something great at $99, so that people have a way into the digital music revolution. But it is every bit an iPod — just a different iPod,'” Levy writes. “Those words have extra resonance today, as last week Apple officially ended the iPod era, discontinuing the Shuffle and the Nano… As you’d expect from someone whose iPod book was called The Perfect Thing, I’m sad about all of this, for lots of reasons.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: R.I.P., iPod shuffle*! You did your singular job exceedingly well!
*Do not eat iPod shuffle.
SEE ALSO:
Apple discontinues iPod nano and iPod shuffle – July 27, 2017
My half-giger still works flawlessly, and hasn’t lost any of it’s lengedary sound quality. It still retains a charge longer than ANY of my other iPods. Though I love them all, it’s the only one I’m likely to take to the grave with me. Let’s face it, a dead dude’s still gotta have his jams, yo!
Go Apple!
I have a 1st gen shuffle, 2nd gen shuffle, and 4th gen shuffle (a slick black one that I purchased only last December). I regularly use them all; I just grab one and go out.
I know how to take apart and fix (swap parts on) the 1st gen model (my favorite shuffle), and I have “spare parts” to keep it going. The 1st gen shuffle has really amazing sound. And it’s the only shuffle that can charge and play at the same time, plus it does NOT need any special USB docking cable to sync with computer.
Apple just took away the $80 workout audio iPod in an attempt to push people into $350 watches and expensive wireless headphones. Absolutely stupid.
Apple thinks it can replace the Mac with the iCloud and rental music. I am not seeing any advantage in making that leap.