Via USAT: Apple to make $499 Mac, $99 iPod.
The advent of the cheaper computer I had already heard, but am intrigued by this:
The iPod Shuffle, available immediately, is smaller than most packs of gum, weighing less than an ounce.Unlike the hard drive-based iPod Mini, it doesn’t have a display. There’s a scroll wheel for the controls so a user can either play the songs in order or have the device automatically shuffle stored songs in a random order.
Apple is selling two versions of the iPod Shuffle.
The smallest will have 512 megabytes of storage and cost $99. A one-gigabyte version, which holds 240 songs, will sell for $149. The lowest cost iPod is the mini, which costs $249 for four gigabytes–enough to store about 1,000 songs.
Interesting. A display is cool, but I guess not necessary. Of course, that means no playlists, which I assume you can have on the standard iPod.
While I have no portable MP3 device (unless you count my laptop) I must admit that the concept gets more and more appealing all the time–like last night there was a specific song I was looking for, but couldn’t find the darn CD it resides on. For that matter, I am getting to the point where I prefer thinking in terms of individual songs and not whole albums.
Beltway Traffic Jam
The daily linkfest:
Kevin Aylward has created a paginated version of the CBS report that’s web accessible.
Mark Hasty chronicles the joys of traveling the Upper Midwest.
Steven Taylor contemplates the value of portable music.
Fontana Labs discove…
Trackback by Outside The Beltway — Tuesday, January 11, 2024 @ 3:43 pm
I love using iTunes to convert my CDs into MP3 files. I never use CDs any more, unless I need to play them in a regular CD player. The Bee Gees box set Deb got me for Christmas got converted over within a day and I use a playlist of my favorites. With the CDs I’d have to just play them through, or create four playlists, and change media repeatedly to hear all the ones I like.
I think the kind of money they get for iPods is insane, but I’d sure love to have one, or a good surrogate, sooner or later.
For what it’s worth, I’ve thought of individual songs rather than albums since before the MP3 format existed. And really before the CD format existed, or at least had caught on. I’ve bought so many albums for a single song over the years, and that’s just absurd.
Comment by Jay — Tuesday, January 11, 2024 @ 3:44 pm
The individual song thing used to be popular back when we used cassettes, in my decadent, hedonistic youth. We would make tapes of our favorites for easy background music for our parties. Or for cruising. That’s what comes from living in a town with crappy radio stations. After you collected enough you could in effect shuffle the tapes to get variety.
Sounds like this iPod shuffle is a very upscale version of our party tape shuffle.
Lunacy
Comment by lunacy — Tuesday, January 11, 2024 @ 4:47 pm
I can’t see the benefit of the “shufflepod,” but then, I’m an iPod owner with over five days of music on his iPod. I suppose they’ve done some market research on this product, but it seems so offbase to me. It may go down as another failed bit.
Comment by bryan — Tuesday, January 11, 2024 @ 7:44 pm
You can make playlists for the iPod shuffle with iTunes. Then you have the option of playing through the list as it or listen to random songs. I already have an iPod so I don’t want one of these, but I really, really like the price.
Comment by Sean Hackbarth — Tuesday, January 11, 2024 @ 9:37 pm
There are a lot of people who wanted an iPod like device for exercise but did not want the bulk and cost of the regular iPod. This device was made for them and I think it will be massively popular as well, what I really want i the iMac mini which is a better computer than my Powerbook and almost as transportable as well as cheap!
Comment by goodsnake — Wednesday, January 12, 2024 @ 1:27 pm