No screen, you gotta be kidding me. !!!!
What do you guys think,
A clever idea or a total flop. ??

It's after the holidays, bad timing if you ask me. The lack of an LCD is rather daunting...maybe OK if this were an 64-128MB model from a few years back but the 1GB version holds over 250 songs (at 128kbps).

'course Jobs says "look at the price" and I'm sure there are many low-end consumers who frothed over the hard-drive iPods but couldn't afford them...now they buy one and become "in style".

Note #2 on the iPod shuffle page:

"2. Do not eat iPod shuffle"



Anyway, I think the forced shuffle is pretty lame. The Mac mini is verrry cool, though. That thing is tiny!

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....topic=30559&hl=

OK, crippled. If you are the type that listens to whole albums and it can play sequential and/or playlists, then you can get by without a display.

on the minimac, is this their entry into the living room media computer market?
THe price is good if you already have the extras (display, keyboard, mouse) from another PC. If you are buying an LCD monitor to go with it, then the price is nudging too close to a low end Imac, which would give you the G5 64 bit processor.

I'm beginning to think people who say they'll not buy one because it has no screen are either particularly dim or else they're unwilling to admit they just don't want one and need an excuse. The screen thing is not a problem. If it held 20,000 songs you'd have a point, but anyone can scroll through a couple of hundred without a problem.



Makes you wonder why no one else came up with this extreme simplicity earlier, considering the awful UI most cheapo-players usually have.

Is quite ironic that one of the pioneer of the GUI has come with this no sense gadget.
The only rational argument I found defending the Shuffle lack of screen was that the user interface get reduced to a minimum, like almost disappearing, so there is no choice to be made, no complexity, no anxiety also I admit that a good thing going for it is the AAC compatibility.
But I'm sorry, I'm open to brave new ideas, but this is ridiculus.
This is part of Jobs minimalistic obsession that is getting a bit boring now.
If I want to buy a cheap DAP I'd go and buy those Sandisk sticks that are even cheaper have a GUI and a decent sound quality FM radio and Mic.
The lack of a GUI means, no Audiobooks, no sound Equalization, No battery status, no selection of what I really want to hear, besides there is no FM radio or Mic recording.

If they get away with this is just because their Brand power.
But I bet you that in the long run this Shuffle thing will be quickly forgotten.
And I think IS expensive for a DAP lacking so much.

The 512 megs version from sandisk is 150$, so it's not arguable, the shuffle is the clear winner.

It's about the same price as a Muvo that has screen an FM tuner it seems.

I think they're just trying to be innovative and come up with something new. It might just turn out to be a success

pure genius,

a lot of apple decisions are hard to understand at first, like the lack of a floppy drive, building imacs into their monitors etc.

i was pretty disgusted to read the design of the shuffle. Then after a while, I thought about it more. The way I listen to music is by genre (it would be pretty boring to listen to song at a time and daunting since there are so many to choose from), this way it randomizes and makes a relatively small number of songs seem more. Ok so it doesn't have a screen blah blah, but with mp3 watches and players with 256mb selling for >$99, this keychain seems so much more well thought out (than trying to duplicate the HDD based GUIs on a flash based scale).

This better be USB2 though, as it will pretty much require constant syncs (the potential achille's heel).


But yet the simplicity of it is incredible, they've obviously researched this niche to death.

If you were right, it might be. The SanDisk 512 meg one is $113 on Amazon, and can be found for about $100 if you actually spend more than 30 seconds looking around.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00066EK3G

The lack of a screen is not a big deal here. The lack of playlist support and the lack of features like radio and such will hurt it somewhat. It's a good first attempt by Apple, I'd say, but I don't think it'll be a big win.

The SanDisc uses AAA batteries, so after a couple of years you would have burnt a lot of bucks just on those.

And the iPod Shuffle uses a built in LiON rechargable battery with no way to replace it, so after it fails in a couple of years, you'll have burnt out a lot of bucks for a now non-working player device.

The axe swings both ways.

They'll last more than two years though, my 4 year old 5GB iPod is still going strong

One pack of AAA batteries every month is $60 a year, certainly something to consider

This is a much smaller battery. It might not last as long.


Or buy rechargables, like I posted above. I've been using AAA NiMH rechargables for 6 years now. Still work great. Unlike LiON, NiMH can be easily refreshed, if they start to wear down a bit.

Do you really think that someone could buy for $60 of batteries without buying rechargeable ones instead?

How many hours does it get on a cell? My kid's Iriver is rated 40 hours on an alkaline cell. 2 hours a day for a year would be under 20 cells.. roughly 10 bucks in large packs.

plus of course the mentioned NiMH route.

Up to 15 hours. It is on the Amazon page.

I don't think so, when the first gen. iMacs came out with no floppy and cd-burners cost 200-300 for a 2x, it sure was a pane in the ass to get files between home and school, expecially in the 56k days of '99. The lack of a floppy may be one thing, but the lack of a GUI is another. They could at least put some cheap ass LCD on their and jack the price by $10-20.

Someone said bad timing...
...market-wise it is the perfect timing. People rushed at the iPod mini because it was the cheapest then. The iPod shuffle got sold out in less then 10 minutes. Numbers speak for themselves and Apple oviously has one heck of a marketing department.

Mithrandir said so.
And in fact, it doesn't matter that it was launched after the holidays. Even without iPod shuffle, the most sold electronic gadget at Amazon in the Christmas season was the iPod. The second most sold was the iPod mini...

There's no such thing as bad timing for the iPod line of products. Whenever a product is launched, it will make a huge success.

So has anyone tried using AAC files *other* than iTunes-encoded ones? My Shuffle doesn't seem to play Nero-encoded files at all - though the same files work fine on my 3G iPod.

Separate question, laner:
Can you copy music to and from the Ipod Shuffle as though it were a flash drive (no necessary ties to Itunes)?
It is clear it can be used as a flash drive, but other players often will have the files and music separate, and no one has been clear on this yet.

You must sync the music from iTunes. It won't read the music in the drive-partition.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300590

Yup - same as the full-fledged iPod. The music is stored in the hidden iPodControl folder, and must be indexed through iTunes in order to play.

I assumed as much. Maybe a firmware upgrade will fix this.

That is one thing I was afraid of. Apple now has such a huge control over the AAC market, they don't even need to worry about interoperability any more

Early reports suggest the sound rivals the iPod. If that is TRUE, then this thing is far superior to competing devices from iriver, Rio, and Creative, screen or no screen - assuming one cares about sound quality.

Other flash players do not rival their hard drive big brother's sound quality.

Ezra, this is probably not the board to say that on (I think most will agree about Rio's flash players, though).

I agree with Roberto. I don't think they should be able to call it LC-AAC capable unless it can decode all valid LC-AAC. Last time I checked that meant not just iTunes. iTunes has a good encoder but so does Nero and they're really cutting off part of their market. But as you said they such a stronghold over the AAC market they don't care

And it doesn't really matter to them, really. I know very few people outside HA that use Nero for AAC encoding. People use Nero for what it is - a CD and DVD burner. They can't be arsed to search for the AAC encoder hidden under menus and dialog boxes, unfortunately...

About Real Player: encoding to AAC isn't particularly easy on it either, and it holds the karma of the "Real" name, which became synonim of bloated software that works badly.

So, I guess Apple cornered the AAC encoder market too :B

It doesn't actually have separate partitions. It's just putting the music in a hidden directory and reading a database of some type, written by iTunes, to know where the music is. Same as the normal iPod's in this respect.

>So, I guess Apple cornered the AAC encoder market too :B

They are abusing their position (45% of the market), pure and simple, they did something in the last iPod firmware update to bork compatibility with Real's DRM AAC and they seem to be testing the water by making the shuffle only iTunes compatible (Apple know damm well there are Nero, Winamp, FAAC, Compact, Real AAC), the firmware code base for the Shuffle is almost certainly the same as a normal iPod.
Apple are not doing AAC any favours by breaking compatiblity.

Where did you get that number from? Installed iTunes base?

I think it's hard to find out how many people are actually using each AAC encoder. I believe most people using iTunes are using it to encode to AAC, because that's the default option and because several of them have the iPod. Now, people using Winamp probably aren't using it to rip to AAC. Winamp became a ripper too late, and people got used to using it only as a player.

Real... well, it carries the Real brand. They did got better as of late, but they still have a huge karmic load.

Compaact is virtually unknown, AFAIK, and Faac still suffers from low quality stigma.


I personally don't think Apple has an evil agenda and deliberately broke playback of these encoders in Shuffle. I think they are just not worrying about interoperability anymore, thanks to their virtual monopoly on AAC.

I bet most people select the "Convert higher bitrate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod" in the iPod shuffle prefs. That means the songs will be transfered over and play back fine (as transcodes) no matter if its encoded in Nero, iTunes or anything else..

>Where did you get that number from? Installed iTunes base?

I have seen numbers banded around of total sales, as the iPod is quite expensive and as they have only had Hard Disk players until now that helps their apparent share, this page says they have over 50% of the market, could be wrong:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3741624.stm

Put another way, Rio would have to sell maybe 8 'S Series' players to match one iPod sale (not profit).

Well, those numbers can't be translated into AAC encoder usage (if that's what you meant earlier). One would think they have way over 90% of that share at the moment.

Unless the file is already under 128kbps - as many of my AAC files are - they're all Nero VBR encoded at the "Internet" setting (90-110kbps). And the ones that are above 128kbps aren't significantly higher, so the transcoding from 128-160kbps AAC -> 128kbps AAC results in some pretty significant sound quality loss. Not to mention the time involved. In other words, it's a pretty poor solution.

I've been toying with the idea of reencoding all my APE albums to LAME 3.96.1 for greater compatibility anyway - this might be as good a time as any.

That comes with their popular music store as well. I think it is a shame if there are other devices that support AAC, yet are unable to playback iTunes music store files. Let alone now Apple devices don't allow playback of other AAC encoded files. To me this presents a bad move for the future of AAC. It will become proprietary with Apple. I don't understand why Apple seeks to distance themselves with so much proprietary software and equipment. They remain without my support because of this.

At the risk of sounding flip ... oh, come on. Nobody is going to buy the Shuffle on the basis of some cost-vs-functionality calculation. You're going to buy one (or not) based on whether you think it's cool and fun and neat-looking, and therefore worth (or not worth) blowing a hundred bucks on.

Personally, I suspect it's only a matter of time before I throw down the money and strap that little white halyard around my neck. I don't care about the lack of features. I've got features up the wazoo on my real stereo. Most of my casual music listening, on the other hand, consists of setting iTunes to "Party shuffle" and hitting the Play button. I've got a lot of songs from many genres in the library, and it's fun to see what comes up.

YMMV, naturally. But to me, the Shuffle is cute, and it looks like fun. End of analysis.

halyard? Totally OT and all, but how does make quite that much of a typo?

Anyway, many people will look at it from a price vs. functionality PoV. That's why it is $99/$149, and not $199/$249. At the higher cost, it would not be an interesting product to anyone but people who want one as a fashion accessory.

Not to continue the offtopicness any further, but halyard is a kind of rope. Probably not a typo.

From dictionary.com:

halyard

n : a rope for raising or lowering a sail or flag

Well, that definitely explains how one could confuse "lanyard" with it .