New iPod Shuffle Talks If You Want It To

Lonnie Lazar ()

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Apple introduced an all-new redesigned iPod Shuffle Wednesday, touting it as the first music player that talks to you.

Except that it’s not the first music player that talks to you. Does anyone remember the Nanocromatic iPods introduced just last summer?

Those iPod nanos also featured the “Voice Over” function being touted as Wednesday’s big new improvement to the shuffle, which now sports 4GB of storage (up from 2GB). Apple’s smallest music player now features playlist support, however and syncs with iTunes through an included USB cable which connects to the shuffle’s audio jack.

The new shuffle also comes with earbuds featuring on-cord remote control.

The new design is rectangular rather than square, comes in Silver or Black and costs, as did previous models, $79. Apple is making these things smaller all the time, with the new shuffle being smaller than a house key and not much thicker.

It’s probably a good thing the shuffle’s Voice Over function, which supports 14 languages, is accessed manually, to tell users the name of the artist and song playing or run through the playlists available on the device. On the iPod nano introduced last summer, the Voice Over feature was an on-or-off setting and quickly grew tiresome when it would kick in at the mere changing of the device’s orientation from vertical to horizontal.

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More user control is good; thank you, Apple.

UPDATE: this piece has been edited to more accurately reflect the new shuffle’s capacity. Thanks to readers who pointed out the error in the original report.

17 comments »

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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Posted in iPod, News |

  • Fats Vernon

    Nobody is asking: How do you sync it? Even Apples site doesn’t show the bottom of it or mention it. Is there a new accessory you have to buy? I can’t imagine something this tiny has a 30pin connector on it. So again, how do you sync it??

  • shawn s.

    More user control is good
    but tying that to the headphones is bad.

  • http://cultofmac.com Lonnie Lazar

    @Fats Vernon: It syncs with an included USB cable.

  • Dickey Roscombe

    This is awful. More user control? Are you joking?
    Say you’re listening to a podcast and want to scan back a few seconds to catch something you missed or scan forward to skip a boring segment–how do we do that? How do we go backward at all, for that matter? I watched the video, and all I saw was how to skip ahead. Maybe there are easy answers to this, but they don’t appear to be forthcoming.
    Also, one of the best innovations of the second-generation shuffle was the separation of the on-off and shuffle buttons. Putting them back together just means users will go back to accidentally turning their ipod off when they only mean to set it at “play in order.”
    Finally, this ipod is completely useless to anyone who wants to use third-party headphones.
    This looks suspiciously like Apple is downgrading the usability of their cheapest ipod in order to force consumers to move up the price ladder to the Nano. They’re turning the shuffle into a product that only makes sense as your second iPod rather than as your primary device. Add to that making it incompatible with third-party headphones, and this is the sort of nonsense I expect from Microsoft.
    This is beneath Apple. Of course, I could be wrong, and would love to hear why. For now, I’m holding onto my wonderful 2nd Gen shuffle; maybe I’ll pick up another one as a backup (they’re still on sale–hopefully they stay that way). Yuck.

  • Klaus

    So… since the controls are tied to the cord of the headphones – you can’t use the new Shuffle with any other headphones? Ouch.

  • Austin

    Yes, the USB cable has a USB plug on one end and a 3.5 mm tip-sleeve connector on the other. You plug one end into the headphone port on your iPod and the other end into your Mac’s USB port.

    This begs the question, if Apple is able to engineer something like this, and it works just as well as charging and syncing on other iPod models, why keep the 30-pin connectors on the other iPods? All future iPods should get rid of the 30 pin connector in favor of charging and syncing through the audio jack.

  • Martijn

    Every shuffle so far has an option to shuffle the songs or play them in order, multiple playlists is new though.

    It is the ideal sport music player, I don’t know how many times I’ve thrown my first generation Shuffle involuntary around, but it keeps on going and you can go a long way on a single charge.

  • Emily J

    @Austin:

    I would imagine that charging through the audio jack would work a lot faster and better for a small iPod with no screen than for an iPod with a larger screen, higher power requirements, and a larger battery. (There might still be a reason to go ahead and keep that 30-pin connector.)

  • Maarten

    It costs $80, it got 4Gb, speaks in 14 langages, batterylife is now 10h instead of 12.

    Cheap aftermarket earbuds won’t be long in the coming and good ones will also enter the market in a while, so why bother?
    If you don’t like, want or need it, I suggest you just don’t buy one….

  • Pedro

    Is Apple working on a new touch? anyone knows or hear rumors about it?

  • nak

    @Lonnie Lazar: 4GB is new, so 1,000 songs is new. Previous shuffles held 250 and 500 songs for the 1GB and 2GB models respectively.

    @Dickey Roscombe: my thoughts exactly!

    And what’s more, when your earbuds break or you lose them (which will inevitably happen with a product designed for use in a more physically active setting) you’re stuck spending nearly half the cost of the iPod itself for new ones.

    @Austin: because the dock connector does more than charge. It has several outputs, such as component video, line-level audio, and it can do those IOs simultaneously. Being able to charge and output audio at the same time makes devices such FM transmitters that charge your iPod while letting you listen to your iPod through your car’s radio possible.

  • nickux

    Yay, just what I wanted. Really convoluted controls through a proprietary set of headphones. Seriously, buttons are NOT a bad thing to have on an iPod- Apple! This is a big mistake, I think. Engadget is reporting there will be an additional dongle so 3rd party headphones will have controls. Yay even more money and more complex crap. Nothing says simple design like having to shoe-horn a bunch of accessories to CONTROL my music!!!

  • http://coreminimalist.blogspot.com Dann

    Like Klaus said, the only way you can control it is through Apple headphones! This is simply unacceptable. You can have multiple playlists? So what? You’re still stuck with crappy headphones!

  • Klaus

    After some thinking, I can’t help but think that the new Shuffle is not a good product, since it is actually offering less control (no scanning, just skipping) and forces users to stick with Apple headphones or buy 3rd party adapters – the latter basically ruining the whole idea of having a small, simple and cheap product. Also, since the 2nd generation of the Shuffle already is such a small device I can’t see much advantage in making it even smaller.

    It is hard to fight the impression that the new Shuffle was built mostly in order to tie consumers even more tightly to Apple’s proprietary peripherals.

    But I am amazed how well Apple did this. I recall that when the first headphones with controls + mic came out, they appeared to be a typical early-adopter-item and in this way also a bit of a luxury product. While I didn’t buy them, I did think they were kind of cool. The form-factor had already been introduced with the hands-free headphones for the iPhone. The in-ear-headphones with the higher sound quality followed after that and got pleasant reviews.

    So when the new Shuffle appeared I can imagine many people already had 1) an idea about how the headphone-controls work 2) a rather positive image of these headphones.

    If only the open-source crowd would produce something that was as appealing and easy to use as Apple’s products… Thank god Steve Jobs doesn’t produce toilet-paper dispensers. We’d be stuck with Apple-Paper® for life. ;)

  • imajoebob

    @abunchofpeople:
    Technically, this IS the first music player that talks to you. The nano is, technically, a multimedia player, since it does video and games. It’s splitting hairs, but true.

    My gut reaction is why the price increase? I know the capacity went up, but entry level for the iPod just went up (another) ten bucks. SInce you can get 4GB SDHC cards for less than $10, this seems fishy.

    The 30-pin connector is needed for video transfers. Video is why they dumped Firewire support (the bastards!), they needed the extra pins to transfer the data. Can you imagine how long it would take to update 32GB on your touch with the headphone jack? Let’s not talk about 120GB on the classic.

    I think Apple would like to streamline the iPod lineup to 3 basic models: touch screen, “classic screen,” and no screen. They tried to combine the classic and nano with that horrible square model, but nobody bit. If they can get a decent capacity HDD/SSD into a nano the classic will disappear. Anyone who actually wants video will choose touch anyway, so the screen size isn’t important.

    This shuffle looks like it’s supposed to be your second player for the gym or jogging. You don’t want to use your HDD classic exercising, and you don’t risk your touch, so you buy a shuffle for the 90 minutes 3 times a week. But since I can get the AppleCare for less than the cost of the shuffle, I’d probably take my chances! Or for 15 bucks I can get everything this has except iTunes off of ebay. At 80 bucks that makes the shuffle more jewelry than music player.

    This all boils down to a gross misunderstanding of entry-level psychology by Apple. They’ve got killer value in their middle an upper tier products, but still haven’t figured out how to balance design, usability, and affordability. This is not an entry level price for an mp3 player. Just consider what a killer product this would be (even at 2GB), if it was $49 and came in nano colors!

    Like the TV, and even to an extent the mini and the air, I think it’ll be another niche (i.e. dog) product in Apple’s lineup.

  • duh

    perfect for sports, except these earbuds fall from my ears even when I barely move my head… love the product but headphone doesn’t seem very applesmart to me…

  • gigaguy

    I hope the sound is improved over the current ones.
    For portable/exercise use the shuffle is is a great device IMO. I like the remote cable option a lot, I was looking for remote options for my Touch. I had the Griffin remote/mic but it broke.

    Only negative I see on the shuffle is price & battery life should be 20-24 hours like my Sony mp3s used to easily do.
    Wish it came with the in-ear remote phones, I would get it.
    for now, I’m gonna wait to hear sound quality reviews.