Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

I like Apple. Well, let me clarify; I appreciate what apple do. They provide beautiful, well made products that, on the most part, perform at levels well above the most popular competitors. But there are two things that the company does that really grind my gears. One is the fact that they charge absolutely insane amounts for a lot of their products, (You can spec up a MacPro for over £16,000 that won’t be as fast as an £8000 PC) and the other is when they pull the kind of shit they have with the new iPod Shuffle.

So what’s so bad about it? Well Apple have failed in two areas in which they usually excel: function and fashion. Functionally they’ve committed a Dragon’s Den sin and solved a problem that never existed in the first place, not once, not twice but thrice! Firstly they’ve removed all the controls from the device itself, instead placing them in a “convenient” place on the cable of the right ear-bud. Not such a big deal, you might think, but it is. As of now there is only one manufacturer of ear-buds compatible with the new Shuffle… you guessed it, Apple. This is an issue because not only is the sound quality rather lack-lustre, they fall out of a lot of peoples’ ears, including mine, and seeing as this is intended as an active MP3 player (one you’d use at the gym) you want your ear-buds to stay firmly in place. Let’s not forget, there was nothing inconvenient about where the controls were on the old Shuffle… you could clip the thing anywhere on your person and as such have the controls anywhere you wanted.

The second non-problem Apple have solved is the lack of a screen to display the song title and artist. They haven’t done this by introducing a screen either, that would be too simple. What they’ve done instead is introduce VoiceOver. That’s right, when you change tracks you can have your iPod actually tell you what the title and artist is. Wait a minute! Did anyone actually request this? I get the feeling that some thumb-twiddlers in R&D needed to come up with something to keep their jobs safe during the recession. I mean, come on! It’s not even like the voice sounds good. It sounds like they gave some studio time to Stephen Hawking and HAL 9000‘s retarded robotic children and got them to read out the iTunes catalogue! And that’s not even the punchline. The PC voice sounds better than the Mac one! Epic self ownage!

The third non-problem they addressed is the least severe and that is the lack of play list functionality. The new shuffle now comes with 4GB of storage which means there is now room for enough music to maybe require sorting by play list. But let’s think about that for a minute. We’ve already established that this player is mainly intended for active use such as running or gym training. During those times you don’t want to mess around with flicking through your play lists and songs. You’d just put the music on there that you want and play it. I admit it’s a nice extra and makes use of the otherwise useless and laughable VoiceOver but there was truly no real need for it.

Now let’s talk fashion. One thing Apple has always been good at is designing beautiful objects. That is until now. This version of the Shuffle lacks two of the things that made the previous version such a design hit; The controls and the colour options. The simple and elegant controls on the old version were beautiful and added some really nice design detail to the device as a whole. This coupled with the fairly wide choice of colours made the previous model a fashion accessory in it’s own right. The new Shuffle comes in silver and black. Wow, careful guys, you don’t wanna break your imagination bone.

It’s not all bad, though. Apple have actually priced this thing pretty well with a not-too-shabby 4GB of storage coming in at £59 including dock and proprietary ear-buds. The build quality looks to be impressive too, as you’d expect. But these pros don’t outweigh the cons, not by a long shot. If you want an iPod shuffle buy the previous generation, while you still can. If you want 4GB of storage, spring the extra £50 and get a new iPod nano. Those things are actually good.