My Mac Mini has been shipped off to the robots awaiting my arrival in Seattle next week, but the iPod Shuffle still hasn't. They expect it to ship on the 24th, though, so there should be enough time for it to make it before I go back on the 30th. Pretty crazy demand for those things, by the way. I hear that there's a 4-week backorder in a lot of places now.
I may be missing something here, but did the "old" iPod not have a shuffle function? I realize that the iPod Shuffle is much smaller than a regular iPod or even iPod Mini, but can the ability to shuffle songs really be a major selling point on a MP3-player? Or have Apple invented some new ingenious form of random?
The reason I'm asking is that you're the resident Aplle expert around these parts, and I'm a bit curious...
I didn't even understand that the selling point of the Ipod shuffle is that it shuffles songs I thought it was just some marketing name, but now that I have one everyone keeps asking me, "So how does it shuffle?"
How does it shuffle?
I have no idea, I program all of my own music to play in a certain order so I have never used the shuffle nor do I think I ever will, but I suppose if did I would probably have to answer, "randomly, it shuffles randomly."
As for the IPod shuffle itself I have to say that this is the only IPod that I'm interested in for both it's size and simplicity. I can't be bothered to lug around anything that is larger than a cell phone and can't withstand major unanticipated shock (You never know when ninjas are going to attack!) .
So the IPS's size is just right and also another super advantage...
drum roll please...
I love not having a display. Don't need it, don't want it, don't care if I can't navigate, drill down, or see what the name of the song is.
I don't need you to tell me how fuckin' good my coffee is, ok? I'm the one who buys it. I know how good it is.
The shuffle in the iPod Shuffle is in two parts. The first part is that you can setup iTunes to automatically load another set of random songs to your Shuffle whenever you plug it in. You can set some criteria such as least often played, rating, genre etc. iTunes tries to optimize the list to fit exactly the free space on the Shuffle. This way you don't have to take the time to select which songs to put on it.
The other part is that the device only has three settings, Off, Shuffle (random), or playlist (play the tracks in order as they appear on the device).
So no they haven't really reinvented random, but yes they have.
I do have admit though that when watching the keynote Jobs said "This past year thousands or iPod users have discovered shuffle" I was a bit suprised. My first thought was 'what took them so long?'. I've been playing music randomly ever since I first got a five disc CD player. Also the way he said it, it sounded like he thought it was a revolutionary idea.
I agree with Tim, I don't really need a display. I have a minidisc player right now, and it is almost always on random. And the only times I use it are when I wouldn't have time to look at the display anyways. I am not gonna stop jogging or snowboarding to check what track I am at. At most I want to be able to quickly jump to the next song or pause it so that I can hear the ski patrol trying to stop me from going out of bounds :)
The normal iPod has shuffle mode on the actual player. As for wether or not you can use this new iTunes shuffle loading with a regular iPod, I have no idea.
David, I forgot to ask in my first comment, when did you order your mini? I ordered mine late in the evening on the 11th and my order status page still says that it will ship on or before the 28th of January. Now that people are starting to receive their shipment notices I am wondering where mine is! :)
Challenge by Gloria on January 27, 4:36
I have a question about the shuffle--does the playlist setting, which will "play the tracks in order as they appear on the device," allow a person to put a specific playlist into the shuffle so that it WON'T shuffle the music? I love my ipod and I, too, don't give a damn about the dispaly, etc., but i am addicted to audiobooks and classical music. I find my ipod a little awkward sometimes at the gym. I would LOVE a shuffle--if it didn't play a book randomly. very William Burroughs, I admit, but I think it would get old very quickly.
Challenge by Zaphod on February 14, 20:27
The shuffle will only play audio books when playing continuous mode, when you shift it to shuffle it's skips all audio books.
Which works great for me, I shuffle the music for a while, then when I want to listen to the book I shift to continuous play, hit play three times (the jump back to the top of the playlist command) and it plays the audiobook that I placed at the top of the playlist. And it remembers where you were in the audiobook just like the big iPods.
