Apple’s New Shuffle … Loosing sight of reality?

I doubt I’m the first to say this but Frankly I don’t even know when the shuffle was announced. I just stumbled on it today and while I like the mini-ness of it I think there is a serious issue.

Portable music players, since the original Walkman, have always come with headphones. I’ve always expected them to be crap and never have I been disappointed in that. In the past, they were a thin metal headband and scratchy foam cover, now you can expect a hard plastic in-ear set that leaves a lot to be desired. Over the recent years I’ve settled on Sony’s relatively in-expensive in-ear buds. They are comfortable, with a rubber surround and have good sound quality. I have a set of the headphones that came with the iPod Nano and they are the typical garbage. Apples standard headphones are made of hard plastic and hurt my ears after less than an hour of listening so when I bought my iPhone I didn’t even take the headphones out of the box.

Now though, we come to the point of my ranting. The iPod shuffle has no buttons on it. None, nada, zilch, zero. So in order to control the volume, or even skip a song you MUST use Apple’s P.O.S. headphones. If you loose the headphones that came with your shuffle, or they break, you’re going to be out $30 to get a new set. That’s nearly half the cost of a new Shuffle people.

“But Kyle, Apple has better ones you would like”. They do, your right, but they are $80, the same cost as the device. Personally, I have a tough time spending $35 on the set I like, $80 is too much.

The whole thing reminds me of this very old Foxtrot comic. Before the advent of USB drives and wide spread email. Floppy disks were THE way to move data from one place to another.

Apple, I’m sure you thought this through and have a plan. But I wont be buying it, nor do I recomend it to anybody.

myPod

I am now an official Apple product owner. Last Christmas, I bought an iPod Nano for Kerry and this year, her parents got her an iPod Touch, leaving the iPod Nano in my hands

When the iPod originally came out I had a lot to say against it, however of the years and generations, Apple has made changes in all the right directions. Battery life was one of my biggest concerns with the original iPod. I don’t mean the time between charges, but the overall life of the battery sucked and from what I understood was not covered under the warranty (although I can’t find any evidence of that now). But battery technology has made leaps and bounds in the past 5 years and while the battery in my iPod Nano isn’t technically “user-replaceable” its not impossible to do with some know how.

I had, and still do to some extent have a gripe with the price. Since this particular iPod was sort-of free. But there are some things the iPod has that justify the price. The internal memory seems to be really high quality and fast, which is a nice plus. I’ve owned a couple creative devices and transfer times (particularly of encrypted content) were horrendous.

So far it’s one of my favorite Christmas presents, and it’s inspired me to do some cleanup of the 35Gb of digital music I’ve had lying around, removing the crap I dont own or listen to and organizing all my data.

Old Dogs, Old Tricks

Microsoft took another swing at Apple’s digital music dominance today by announcing two fancy new Zune players. Beefing up the company’s portable player offerings, these updated Zunes will complement the existing 30GB Zune device which received a lukewarm reception (to say the least) from digital music lovers. … more

Apple has released an “update” patch for its iPhone that has disabled many—if not most—of the phones that users “modified” for increased capability. Apparently, if you try to return or exchange your bricked phone as defective, Apple will be able to tell that the phone has been hacked and refuse to accept it. It seems that Apple is taking a “Hey, we told you not to do it” approach with these folks. … more

Two interesting story’s from PC-Mag that almost sound backwards. Apple is being Nazi’s about their products and Microsoft is releasing sleek new pocket toys. Although, in truth, neither is really all that surprising. Apple has always been stingy with people modifying their products, and Microsoft seems to have, again, skipped out on a marketing campaign for their new product.

Concessions for iPhone Vetrins

For those that dont know, Apple dropped the price on the iPhone by $200 yesterday making it closer to being affordable for the common technology lovers. But this moved pissed off a lot of people who paid $599 for the shiny new piece of consumer electronic gadgetry; mostly because the iPhone has only been out for 2 months.

So today, I see that Steve Jobs is offering $100 store credit (online, and B&M) for people who purchased the iPhone at the original price.

I can’t help but think that maybe this was the plan for a while now. Plummet the price to stir up some news regarding the new iPhone, and maybe piggyback the release of the new iPod’s as well (which BTW, I think the new nano is ass fucking ugly. Shocking, since apple is usually really good at making sexy electronics), and then milk it even further by offering a concession a few days later.

Vista on an Apple

In January of 2006 I first heard of the availability of getting Windows Mobile on the Palm Treo. Now it doesn’t seem that surprising, but at the time It took me aback. Part of that post, I jokingly said that someday Vista will be available on an Apple. While you can’t actually order an apple from their website with Vista, the newest version of Bootcamp (which didn’t even release in beta until April of 2006, if there were announcements earlier than that, I never heard them) supports running Windows Vista on any current Apple.

Forbidden Fruit

Probably the only thing stopping me is that this apple isn’t $0.59 / lb.

Why Mac’s Suck

My buddy Chris came over the other night (we are practically neighbors now, but thats for another post) and showed me this video. Its well worth the 3 min viewing.