Why Steve Jobs Loved the IPod Shuffle (wired.com) 214
"Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod?" remembers Steven Levy. mirandakatz writes
Apple recently announced that it's officially discontinuing the iPod -- sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music. At Backchannel, Steven Levy offers a requiem... The Shuffle, he writes, was unique in that it was an iPod stripped down to a single basic function -- and, as Steve Jobs told Levy in 2005, it made the perfect [cheap] gift for inculcating young kids in the ways of Apple.
"I will go buy them one of these for 100 bucks apiece," he told Levy, referring to why the Shuffle was an especially appropriate gift for his daughters, six and nine at the time. "They'll probably lose them in 60 days. But they'll get into it this way."
Jobs called the Shuffle "every bit an iPod -- just a different iPod," saying that the definition was simply "a great digital music player." (Though later he'd say that creating a radically smaller Nano was still "a huge bet.") Levy remembers the Shuffle as "one of the company's most fun products ever...stripped down to the one feature I adored," writing that he loved how "algorithmic serendipity" approximated a genius deejay (or "the 'Hand of God' chess move that Deep Blue used to confuse Garry Kasparov into thinking the computer had trespassed into realms formerly limited to brilliant humans.")
I bought my first mp3 player in 2000 -- an Archos Jukebox 6000 which weighed three quarters of a pound. Anyone else have fond memories they want to share about the iPod, the Nano, the Shuffle, your old Newton -- or your own first mp3 player?
"I will go buy them one of these for 100 bucks apiece," he told Levy, referring to why the Shuffle was an especially appropriate gift for his daughters, six and nine at the time. "They'll probably lose them in 60 days. But they'll get into it this way."
Jobs called the Shuffle "every bit an iPod -- just a different iPod," saying that the definition was simply "a great digital music player." (Though later he'd say that creating a radically smaller Nano was still "a huge bet.") Levy remembers the Shuffle as "one of the company's most fun products ever...stripped down to the one feature I adored," writing that he loved how "algorithmic serendipity" approximated a genius deejay (or "the 'Hand of God' chess move that Deep Blue used to confuse Garry Kasparov into thinking the computer had trespassed into realms formerly limited to brilliant humans.")
I bought my first mp3 player in 2000 -- an Archos Jukebox 6000 which weighed three quarters of a pound. Anyone else have fond memories they want to share about the iPod, the Nano, the Shuffle, your old Newton -- or your own first mp3 player?
Three quarters of a pound, eh? (Score:2)
What about ATRAC players? I was playing that game in 1993 as I was lugging around my Sony MZ-1.
http://www.minidisc.org/part_S... [minidisc.org]
My first MP3 player was some sort of iRiver chunky thing with a hard drive. It was clunky and big and unattractive.
Now I just use my 5 year old LG phone.
So I went from being far ahead of the game to just using the cheapest old thing I can find.
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Normally if you are wanting/need a technology that isn't widely available. The only option is to get the latest and greatest. If that technology kicks off then and it gets cheaper. There is a point where you can get what you want and need far behind the curve, as it is a matured technology.
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Everyone in tech does this:
You start off using cutting edge, latest and greatest.
Over time, you eventually default to "cheapest that gets the job done".
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The best part of MiniDisc ATRAC players, for me, was that they ran on a single AA battery and lasted forever. The disc spins up and about a minute or more of music data is buffered into memory. Then the disc spun down.
It was a true masterpiece of clever engineering. Too bad Sony hobbled it with SCMS copy protection and not getting into the computer data storage segment until it was far too late to make any difference.
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My first "MP3" player was a Sony VAIO Music Clip, my second a Sony NW-MS7 Memory Stick Walkman which used MagicGate cards. At the time, they were nice and compact, easily taken places. Even today, the form factor is decent.
Of course, they were DRM-ed to Hell and gone. The Music Clip could take MP3 files, that were "wrapped" with Sony's ATRAC-whatever encryption. The other device had to have everything fully transcoded by the OpenMG software, which only ran under Windows 98. There was no copying files w
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I have my iPod shuffle every time I go to the gym.
It clips onto my shirt tail...and is light, and easy.
I don't want something large and bulky I'm lugging around while working out.
I have my beer gut for that...and I'm trying to get rid of that too!!
I'm not married to Apple music players, I've just enjoyed them for years....what are the other small, lightweight easy to use mp3 players out there?
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There's plenty of similar mp3 players on eBay, most under $3, but I'm pretty sure the battery won't last nearly as long as the iPod shuffle.
iPod Shuffle could fit in Air Pods today (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple could modify and update the Air Pods, removing the need even for a any device to stream from.
A couple of taps to control. Just like the shuffle with a reasonable memory for shuffling a favourite play list.
If the shuffle was that great...
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I had a couple of shuffles which were gifted to me, and worked really well. I passed them along.
Just bought the latest Nano before they ended it. I think they should have included the ability to download tunes directly from iTunes instead of forcing one to connect to a laptop. iTunes on Windows is really flaky.
One question - anybody knows how to transfer YouTube downloaded MP4s into a Nano? For audio files, I can put in an MP3, but for video tracks, what should one use that iTunes allows? Anybody
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What is the source of heat? The airpods as it is have all the volume and amplification circuitry already. That would be 99% of the heatload. Playback of music is cheap processor wise and can be done on even some of the cheapest and smallest available consumer microcontrollers to say nothing of the custom hardware driving the airpods currently.
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For that matter, the device is already decoding compressed music. It isn't receiving pure waveform data as it is.
The only difference is storage and playlist management over what it already does for music.
So Jobs was worse than a drug dealer (Score:5, Funny)
They at least give you the first one for free to get you hooked.
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Don't worry, he'd sell you the papes as well. And the special lighter. And the filter. And the designer bag of chips for the munchies. And you better use them now, because the next bag you get from him won't work with those anymore either.
But he doesn't rip you off, he just wants to make sure you get the best experience!
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If you're looking older than 13, don't bother trying.
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It only works with PSA dealers, which are to real dealers what James Bond is to secret agents.
To recognize a PSA dealer, look for someone super-creepy that for some reason, has no trouble staying where all the kids are. If you resist the urge to run the other way, you may get a pouch of some glowing substance ready for you to inject.
Different World (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a different world one lives in when one laughs off ones kids losing 100 dollar gifts.
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As Hemingway wrote in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro":
"He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. "
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It's a different world one lives in when one laughs off ones kids losing 100 dollar gifts.
Yeah, fucking billionaires. They're all the same.
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I bought my first PC by getting job.
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For Jobs, he could probably had laugh off kids loosing a Macbook Air.
However I think he was trying to be sensible vs. snotty in his message and wasn't laughing it off.
A $100 gift for lower middle class, may be a big gift, however if lost stolen or broken it wouldn't cause financial stress, as a kid could if needed could save up his allowance and buy himself one (even with a modest allowance) . As a kid, I would had more stress knowing that I got this as a gift from someone who cared about me, and had lost
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If you are billionaire and you are living off of 2% interest.
That is $20,000,000 a year.
Working 50 weeks a year: $400,000 a week
With a normal 40 hour week: is $10,000 an hour.
$166.67 a minute
$2.78 every second.
So giving a kid a Macbook air, is equivalent of 12 minutes of work for a billionaire, vs a full weeks of work for a normal middle class.
The average middle class family would had spend 2 hours of work to get them the iPod Shuffle.
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The minimum wage was also $1.60 my first job I got paid $2.65/hr stocking shelves at a grocery store. the minimum wage just kept going up when I got out of high school
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The iPod is dead - LONG LIVE THE IPOD (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now as I type this, an iPod Classic is playing next to me, hooked to portable speakers. Inside it is a 3rd party board with two SDXC slots, each containing a 512GB card. The board treats them as JBOD volumes and concatenates them automatically into one for the iPod, which - while still running the original Apple firmware - now holds 960GB of audio.
In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done. If it gets smashed or dunked in a lake, the SDXC cards can be recovered and put into another iPod.
I used to have a 300 CD carousel made by Sony. It was the size of a pizza oven, and switching between CDs took ages. Now those CDs are all ripped into ALAC and sitting on the iPod. Same with all my audiobooks, and an enormous backlog of podcasts, because why not? I've got room...
That leaves about 300GB, which I have stuffed with backups, since the iPod makes a decent external drive.
Added bonus: It's so old, no one tries to steal it!!
Who needs lossy cloud music, that vanishes the instant you travel out of cellular range? The iPod is still the one essential music listening tool for me. Long may it survive, until third party battery suppliers all lose interest and the warehouses run dry.
Re:The iPod is dead - LONG LIVE THE IPOD (Score:4, Interesting)
... In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done. ...
IIRC, the iPod was the first Apple product to incorporate an acceleration sensor that allowed it to park the HD in cases where it was dropped.
In any case, the classic iPod, with the actually spinning wheel, would spin-up to load 2-3 songs into the buffer, and then spin back down again. That little trick was a real battery-saver. . . unless you were playing a 14+ minute track, in which case the HD would remain spinning for the entire song, draining the battery pretty quickly.
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Do you have a link to this third-party SDXC adapter? Would it work in a 3rd-generation iPod?
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Re:The iPod is dead - LONG LIVE THE IPOD (Score:4, Informative)
I did something similar to my 1G iPod Mini (4GB). It is rather easy actually, since the iPods use standard compact IDE interfaces to their hard drives. Sure, you need to get an adapter that fits, but they're available. Look on MacSales for the Tarkan iFlash Dual.
For my iPod Mini, the process is simply getting a CF-to-SD adapter and then sticking in an appropriate sized SD card. Personally, I went with a 64GB SD card and it has worked really well. Total cost was around $25-30. The only thing I will point out is that I suspect that sometimes the Mini's firmware might struggle with so many songs on the device, but it hasn't been a real problem ... I suspect an iPod Classic would have less of an issue since its firmware is a few years newer.
The only other note I would make is that if you're going to go through the effort of opening the device up to do this, you might as well swap the battery out at the same time if you can. While I've opened my Mini 4 or 5 times, it does seem to me that I might start having some problems after another 5 ... they're not really made to be disassembled a dozen times :-)
cheapness = lifetime / price (Score:4, Insightful)
I bought a 60$ android tablet that lasted for a year. The thing that makes something cheap is not only how much it costs but how long it lasts. People seem to forget this.
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Re: cheapness = lifetime / price (Score:2, Insightful)
People also forget that there is good, lasting, inpexpensive gadgets. Is up to them to buy the right ones.
If they are too lazy to shop around, just buy Apple. It will be good, albeit very, very expensive. Consider it the price of laziness.
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There are certainly things not to like about Apple products, but generally, the user experience is not among them.
"anyone" does not mean "everyone" (Score:3, Insightful)
sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music
That's right, because there are no other manufacturers of digital music players, and there aren't thousands of other players to choose from.
If you choose to lock yourself into the Apple ecosystem, you choose to limit how you do things.
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I, like many people, bring a phone around with me anyway.
But then you have to 1. upgrade from a flip phone to one that plays music, and 2. be careful to buy one with a microSD slot or risk having to cram all your music into the same 8 GB that already holds the OS, apps, and apps' data.
Cash-strapped parents (Score:2)
Most people have upgraded from flip phones already
Including children whose parents are willing to pay for a phone and a pittance of minutes and texts for the child to use to arrange a ride home but not for a huge data plan? After smartphones became common among adults, children remained a big user base for dedicated media player appliances (such as the iPod shuffle and iPod nano) and small Wi-Fi-only tablets (such as the iPod touch).
and internal storage up to 128 GB is available.
At a substantial upcharge.
A quality smartphone is the best portable music player ever made.
I agree, if money is no object. But I was under the impression that money was still an object, part
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The niche for MP3 players has shrunk, pretty much because of this. For at home, one can buy a NAS with Plex for storing the terabytes of media (music, movies, etc.) For on the go, a smartphone can handle most music collections.
Right now, there are a few niches for MP3 players:
1: Inexpensive items for when one doesn't want to bring their smartphone along (jogging, gym, zombie hunting).
2: Something for the kids (where an iPod Touch is ideal, because it does everything a smartphone does, except make cell c
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If you choose to lock yourself into the Apple ecosystem
Before Amazon Music went live, there wasn't really much choice: it was either iTunes Music Store, buy and rip CDs, or break the law. And back then, even music purchases had FairPlay digital restrictions management.
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If you choose to lock yourself into the Apple ecosystem, you choose to limit how you do things.
Yes because no other music player can play AAC or MP3 formats at all. None.
Only iPod, iPhone, and GPD Win play iTS video (Score:2)
Though competitors' devices can play music purchased from iTunes Store since DRM was dropped in 2009, virtually no non-Apple device can play videos purchased from iTunes Store. Videos still use FairPlay digital restrictions management, which is compatible only with Apple devices and x86-64 Windows PCs running the iTunes application. And the only remotely pocket-sized x86-64 Windows PC that I'm aware of is the 5.5" GPD Win laptop [amazon.com].
It was a tough call (Score:3)
I agonized on the decision between the Archos and the iPod, but made the right choice. I bought one of the first iPods to fly off of the shelves. Those Archos things were heavy, and as I recall, had a non-intuitive, click-button based interface. The iPod––you could grab it without looking to hit 'next song' or whatever.
The iPod replaced radio in my car (no ads, and I had already ripped my 300+ CDs with N2MP3, the first Mac CD ripper. This was long before iTunes had the ability to rip CDs. Remember the ad campaign: "Rip, Mix, Burn"?, and the RIAA's fit over their misinterpretation of those three words?
In use, it was funny to watch people's reactions to the iPod when they'd ride in my car. "Here, it's intuitive, and it's got about 40 albums-worth of music on it. Try it." They'd get confused and have to be told to scroll the wheel and to click the button. Within two minutes, however, they always 'got it' and were hooked. Well, except for my PhD advisor, who hit play with random engaged, and as luck would (not) have it, a song from John Lennon's Shaved Fish came on – "Woman is the Ni..." The title scrolled across the screen. Questions. I had a little explaining about how John liked to write smash-mouth lyrics, and explained the meaning of John's lyrics on this one... I told him to hit "next song" and he was OK after that. Man – 40 albums and that one song comes up when I'm giving my advisor a lift! Anyway, he bought an iPod very soon after.
I've still got an 80 GB iPod lying around here somewhere. I hear that they can handle installation of up to a 256 GB HD, which would be plenty for my entire music collection + books-on-tape. 65 days-worth of music might as well be a radio station, but with no ads. :-) But without a car, that project is on hold.
They had MP3 players in Europe long before the US (Score:2)
I spent a year in Germany, and all over the place were portable CD players that could also play MP3 files (meaning 10 albums on one CD). EU had VAT, so I figured I'd just pick one up when I got back to the States – for cheaper.
WRONG. Every electronics store back in the US would tell me that no such thing existed, and that I was stupid. Yeah, whatever, pimple-boy. I had to wait almost two years for the iPod to come out. It was another year or two before CD-player boom boxes that could play MP3 CD
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No, we had those in the states as well. They just stopped selling once the iPod and it's various clones came down to a reasonable price point.
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No, we had those in the states as well. They just stopped selling once the iPod and it's various clones came down to a reasonable price point.
I returned to the US in the Fall of 2000. There were none to be found, at least in my extensive search at the time (in a major US city).
I won my first MP3 player (Score:2)
My first MP3 player was a Rio Chiba 128 MB, a tiny little thing that had a built-in belt clip, and was even smaller than the iPod I went on to replace it with. It was powered by a couple of AAA batteries, and could store around 60 songs; easily enough for a few albums to listen to on the way to work.
Thing is, I didn't buy the Rio Chiba - I actually won it in a prize draw on the "MyCokeMusic.com" website, not long before that disappeared forever. It was the first time I'd ever won anything of any value. M
""""""""Cheap"""""""""?? (Score:2, Insightful)
$100 for a fucking mp3 player that wouldn't even let you choose songs? A 512 mb Sansa Express was about $25 at the time IIRC, was a similar size and shape (though not brushed aluminum, admittedly), had an sd micro slot, and actually let you choose songs. The Sansa Clip Jam (8gb) is the current iteration, $28 on Amazon right now.
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Not only that, but the mindset which thinks that $100 is cheap.
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If you're out of school and have a real job, $100 IS pretty cheap...hell, I've had bar tabs larger than that before....
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So have I. but then I got married, a mortgage, kids, wife was SAHM, etc. Suddenly, $100 becomes very uncheap.
But when you're as rich as Jobs, $100 is throw-away.
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Well, you did CHOOSE to have a wife, get married and have kids.
If you had decided to forgo 1 or both of those, you'd have a LOT more freedom, and disposable income.
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Most people who buy Apple think $100 is cheap.
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Sentimental (Score:2)
Ah, my 1st gen iPod shuffle and 1st gen iPad -- I can bear to chuck other gadgets away but not these two.
In case anyone is wondering what use is the 1st gen Shuffle -- it holds one long AIFF track of a binaural beats meditation audio. Which is somewhat ironic because it means I never use the shuffle setting.
As if (Score:4, Informative)
>"sad news for anyone who'd prefer to not have to lug around an entire phone to listen to music."
Seriously? As if there aren't many dozens of other MP3 players out there for many, many years, that are also better and cheaper? Sandisk Clip perhaps?
Re:As if (Score:4, Insightful)
My first generation Shuffle still going strong (Score:3)
I love my Shuffle. I'm probably in the minority here, but I still use my first generation 512 MB iPod Shuffle every week, and the original ear buds still work great. This may be one of the last Apple products which was made like an older Apple product . . . it just worked and it was built to last. For over ten years it's been my music player for working out, and on an arm band you don't notice it's there. Tough, truly great design, minimal not for the sake of being minimal but because it made sense to the function of the product. This was a truly high water mark for Apple before it went down the road of disposable products.
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poppycock (Score:2)
cowon iaudio9 (Score:2)
Compaq/HP IPAQ as mp3 player (Score:2)
All i remember is running miles with that thing blaring music into my ears that I couldn't get into another form factor at the time. Now? I wish I had a mini bluetooth mp3 player so I don't have to carry my phone around with me while running. It rains allot and water+i
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There are many water-resistant smartphones, you could look into that. Or just get the mp3 player, those things are dirt cheap from China.
RCA (Score:2)
Not cheap (Score:2)
The iPod shuffle was very expensive for what you got. Cheaper and better music players included a display and didn't require iTunes.
Jobs wasn't the kind of genius people thought. (Score:5, Interesting)
He didn't *invent* the things he supposedly invented. He just figured out how to make already existing things successful.
And Jobs could do that because he *was* a genius at choosing the features to leave out.
Any engineer is aware of tradeoffs. Everything you add to a project has *some* undesirable consequences. But even so the temptation to hit every conceivable point on the punch list is overwhelming for most people.
Where most people would be struggling with that basic impulse, Jobs would play 11-dimensional feature chess. Case in point, the original iPod touch. It didn't have a speaker or hardware volume control. Any normal person would have put *some* kind of a speaker. It didn't make sense; what did it save, maybe $0.25?
But it wasn't something that made a difference in sales; they sold millions of the things, which meant the choice translated into millions more in profit. But still, a speaker and hardware volume controls are things are something you'd want occasionally. Remember with the first gen touch there was briefly a thing where iPod users would unplug their earbuds and offer their jack to another iPod user?
Then Jobs introduced the second gen iPod Touch, and it had a speaker and hardware volume controls. And people who shelled out $299 for the first gen Touch wanted them, and after all the second gen was cheaper at $229. Result: you ended up spending $528 over the course of two years instead of $300.
And that's the difference between genius and mere cleverness: genius is thinking ahead, and also in other dimensions that a clever person isn't considering. That makes genius surprising at the time and obvious in retrospect.
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Steve Jobs didn't figure out how to make things successful, He shoved advertising down everyone's throat. Every other MP3 player was either feature-compatible and cheaper, or better in almost every way and potentially more expensive.
3+ years ago, a FiiO X1 was ~$99, a refurb Sandisk Sansa MP3 player for $25-$50, and both were only limited by the size of the micro-SD card you put in them.
iPod Shuffle (Score:2)
Still using my second-generation iPod shuffle every day. I had to replace the battery - which is a procedure I hope I never do again - and the Chinese replacement doesn't last as long as when the iPod was brand new.
I was waiting for The Source [thesource.ca] to discount their remaining units, however seeing they only have three colours remaining I'm thinking they're not discounting them at all. I guess I'm off to buy one from the local store later today.
What's funny about the iPod shuffle generations [wikimedia.org] is that after... let'
My first was indeed the iPod Shuffle 512MB (Score:2)
I purchased mine in an Apple Store as I was Christmas shopping two iPod 20GBs for family members.
I was skeptical that I would need an MP3 player as I had Winamp and I was almost always in front of a PC.
The iPod Shuffle was just a little white USB stick on a lanyard. Turned out to be the gateway drug for me.
Since that day I've owned two iPods, an iPod touch, three iPhones, one iMac and one Macbook Pro.
Shuffle by itself was great (Score:2)
Like ethernet cards & bluetooth (Score:2)
My first MP# player... (Score:2)
When Smartphones got too big... (Score:2)
1. Cassette Player ("Walkman")
2. CD Player
3. MP3-capable CD player, mini-CD player
4. Proprietary medium player (mini-disc, etc.)
5. MP3 player with internal storage, some expandable (Diamond Rio, Creative Nomad, Archos Jukebox, Apple iPod, Sandisk Sansa)
6. Smartphones (using local media collections) & surviving MP3 players in the market
7. Smartphones (using streaming media collections) & re-emerging MP3 player
That isn't what the 'Hand of God' in chess means (Score:2)
Is that really what the 'Hand of God' in chess means? In chess, this refers to players breaking the rules,
e.g. repositioning pieces after a move is completed.
So, is this article saying that the iPod Shuffle was breaking the rules of pure shuffling and nobody was noticing? Or is the author referring to some kind of magical intuition?
Was the opposite of a gateway drug for me. (Score:2)
I got one as a piece of vendor swag. The process of installing iTunes was bad enough I gate it away without using it once.
Journey to the dark side (Score:2)
it made the perfect [cheap] gift for inculcating young kids in the ways of Apple.
Accept this gift and your journey to the dark side will be complete!
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Bought that, a firewire interface for my PC and a piece of third party code (Xsomethingorother) that allowed you to treat it like a folder on a PC. Never looked back.
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I was sooo close to buying one of those. Decided not to in the end, and then when the iPod came out I realised "£400 and I'll never have to listen to that annoying guy behind me ever again". Bought that, a firewire interface for my PC and a piece of third party code (Xsomethingorother) that allowed you to treat it like a folder on a PC. Never looked back.
Similar but I bought a creative zen, £120 I think it was and didn't need an extra bit of software at all.
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It's the lack of this attitude from Apple that will be it's eventual downfall. Maybe thats the wrong word, I don't think they'll ever go away entirely. But they'll start to lose out to competition again just like when they fired Jobs. It was his attitude to customers and products that brought success. He was clearly about making money, but he also cared about the products and the ideas behind them. The tech world really is worse off without him.
Apple has kind of gone down this path of late, but seems to have recognized the error of their ways. We will see within the next 12 months when the new Mac Pro, iPhone 8, and whatever else gets a rev comes out.
Re:Diamond Rio (Score:4, Insightful)
Next up is the interface. It's hard to remember now, but this was a head and shoulders above everything both in the way you chose a track and also in the way you interacted with your computer. iTunes was good in those days. Ripping a CD and putting it onto your portable player was made easy for non-technical people, and the store later made it easier still.
There are reasons it became so dominant.
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LOL didn't make your numbers, huh creimer?
You mean the weekend after everyone paid the rent or mortgage, and are too broke to buy anything at Amazon? That's why I took the weekend off.
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Most people here aren't living paycheck to paycheck, of course.
It's only a coincidence that most people spend money from the 10th to the 25th of each month.
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People also have credit cards...
Amazon doesn't provide that kind of data.
you are wrong, coming up with silly conclusions based off too little evidence.
I based this on two months of Amazon purchases made from Slashdot. Most purchases were made in the middle of the month.
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But some of us are.
Please send 100 Bitcoins to 17Yvsma9tfiuqVP7QhsFE2VmsFpTEMy17P.
Thank you.
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We don't really care why you took the weekend off, we're just grateful that you did.
I was pleased that my trolls behaved themselves in my absence. Or maybe they took the weekend off as well.
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So that's a "Yes, I failed to make my numbers"?
I still got the daily average for click through even though I didn't post any new links on Saturday and Sunday. The majority of "no sale" days are outside of the 10th to 25th timeframe.
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If I was interested, I'd make sure to look up the book myself.
That's you. Everyone else clicked 6,400 times over the last four months.
You're just giving ammunition to the dickheads following you around.
As if they need my help to bitch about me.
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Fuck off, creimer. Just fuck off.
I would have left a long time ago everyone left me alone. But the dick pics made it personal. I'm here to stay.
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Well the good news is people now see you as a troll and the new APK and are down modding you for it. Good show.
Except that I still get up voted more than I get down voted by the end of the day. You can accuse me of being a troll and/or calling me the new APK, but that doesn't change the fact that I have excellent karma.
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You've been here for years - there's no way you were "just about to leave."
My interest in commenting on Slashdot comes and goes. If I was left alone six months ago, I would have gotten bored and move on to something else.
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And get off my lawn!
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Then Apple better come out with a $50 Apple Watch otherwise it's not an appropriate replacement.
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iTunes is the worst part of the iPod experience....
I miss my old Nomad Jukebox and later the Nomad Zen...
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Here is another suggestion. Have an MP4 player that can play video music tracks, is small enough and also can be connected to any iPod playback system (like in a car). In the player, have an YouTube downloader, as well as a playlist organizer. That way, one can download all the songs one likes, organize it in a playlist, and either watch it while sitting somewhere, or listen to it in the car. It would leverage the iPod compatibility of a lot of players, while enabling people to enjoy what they downloa
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Especially when you look at your status bar and see /goat/ as part of the URL and still click on the link.