Keaton On: The New iPod Shuffle
No, no, don’t get too excited, I haven’t suddenly turned on everybody’s favorite fruit-inspired electronics company, this isn’t ANOTHER blog post ragging on the new iPod on the block, quite the opposite really, I mean, look how small it is, it’s so helpless, that thing can’t possibly stand up for itself. Over-personification aside (That was a really big word!)
Maybe a better title for this would have been “Keaton On: Other people on: the new iPod shuffle” or “Keaton’s response to everybody else’s response to the iPod Shuffle”, but frankly, any headline that implies anything anti-apple is the “Free Beer” of our generation (It makes people read things that they normally wouldn’t).
Maybe the Distortion Field is tuned to my brain-frequency, or maybe I just don’t want to anger the “teletubbie going mad in a gay pride parade” (He will energetically whip you with his fuzzy pink scarf, smiling ear-to-ear the whole time while you gawk awkwardly at what his dance parter is wearing, all the while hoping desperately that the judges don’t make any terrible puns about apple as soon as he finishes, which, of course, to your horror, they immediately do, followed by an even more awkward comment by ‘the teletubbie’ himself complaining that his over-enthusiasm is earning him extra drug tests.
Then the awkwardness escalates so much that you’re forced to stop the video and accept the fact that you’ve just watched Dancing with The Stars and may never regain those lost brain cells, or, umm, I guess to get back to the original topic, been beaten up by Woz. I digress…), but I like this thing, both from a “Yeah, I’d use it” standpoint and a “Yeah, it was a good move for Apple” standpoint.
I did a Twitter search for iPod Shuffle, and I found people complaining about every little thing. Such as “Come on apple, at least put the USB back so I can access it from Finder” and stupider yet ”Who would buy an MP3 player with no built in equalizer?”. Let’s have a bit of a “get in touch with reality” session here shall we? This is the shuffle we are talking about, people who use this are the people who just want a stylish looking device that plays music. They just want it to be small, look good, and be easy to use, and I think there is very little doubt that the shuffle exceeds in all 3 of those categories. That’s the thing about Apple, they understand exactly what they need to do to make the majority of consumers happy, and they do it no matter what their geekier users have to say about it, and say what you will about that strategy, it’s working REALLY well.
One other complaint that I’ve been hearing a lot about is that it seems very hard to control, and yes, controlling anything with 3 buttons can get a little hard, ever tried programming an 80′s era digital clock? But, probably about 90% of the things you want to do with an MP3 player (Changing the volume, and stopping or starting the song) can be achieved with a single click. Anybody who has ever used a computer is familiar with double clicking, so the whole double clicking to skip to the next song thing is also rather intuitive, and holding a button to hear what a song is isn’t too hard either. Where it gets complicated is changing playlists, but even that is probably easy enough for grandma to remember given a quick glance at an instruction manual, and you probably won’t be doing that too much anyway. Sure, they could have added an extra button, but I think 3 buttons is about all you handle with your eyes closed, it’s easy to tell whether you’re on top, on the bottom, or, if you’re neither of those, in the middle. With 4 or 5 buttons you’ve got to search around a bit.
Of course, the #1 complaint about the new shuffle is the fact that you’ll have to get special (probably more expensive) ear buds for it, or be stuck with the apple ones that come with it. No, that’s not a particularly good thing, although again, I don’t know how much users will run into it, seeing as I doubt anybody who only paid $79 for a player will be dishing any more for headphones anyway. Still, it is annoying, but sometimes you’ve gotta take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward. Think about it, now when you’re walking down the street, music blaring in your ears, and a neighbor stops to talk, you don’t have to fish in your pocket to find the iPod, then pull it out so you can find the button. It turns controlling music into something as speedy and mindless as scratching your ear. People will love that, and if anybody can think of a way to do that without making your own custom earbud spec then you’re a smarter man than I. It’s the classic tradeoff – Ease of use or Freedom of use, and we all know which way Apple always goes, and again, say what you will about it, it’s working REALLY well.
iPods still beat all other MP3 players combined, mostly because of these tradeoffs Apple is willing to make. And sure, the geekier people among us will be annoyed, and probably end up switching to a Creative or a Sansa, or, heaven forbid, a Zune (although, for me personally, even as a geek, I’m a rather tin-eared person who hates fishing around for things in his pockets and has very little money, so the shuffle is rather appealing), but as much as we whine and complain about it’s lack of features, and it’s closed-ness, nobody really cares. It’s an iPod. It’s pretty. It works well. That’s all most people need to know.
