Recycle the Shuffle?

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In the most recent "Pundit Showdown" on the Macworld podcast, Chris Breen answered a question about what Apple products should be "recycled" by saying that 5 iPod Shuffles should be mashed together and recycled into "a single iPod that would actually be useful." I listened to this through a mist of irony since this podcast was delivered into my ear canal via . . . you guessed it, a 4GB 3rd Gen. iPod Shuffle.

I commented in this blog three times (here, here, and here) last year on this newest Shuffle before I'd actually handled one, and I didn't comment in the most glowing terms. This is certainly a device that can leave one thinking. . . "Huh?"

But then, for Christmas '09, my wife gave me one. In green. You know what? I love it.

I come not to evangelize for the Shuffle. It appeals to me for very specific reasons that probably aren't applicable to a great many people. I like it because it's small and stays out of my way when I do physical work on my second job that serves to supplement my freelance photography income until the economy stops sucking. I like that it supports multiple playlists, unlike previous Shuffles. It took me a while to make peace with the proprietary headphones, and I thought Voiceover would be cumbersome and difficult to learn. But Voiceover is a breeze, and I soldered my preferred Skullcandy in-ear buds onto the Apple cable, which has been shortened with small rubber bands my wife had on hand for the college cheerleaders she coaches (for pony tails, don'tcha know). It's now the perfect iPod for me. Not for everyone, to be sure, but for me.

The only way to make it better would be to add an FM radio. I don't know if the that's possible in that small a package, but I can dream. (I visuallize a "playlist" of station presets that could be navigated like any other playlist on the Shuffle, similar to the way the original Griffin iTrip worked).

If you're into getting geeky with smart playlists, and aren't picky about being able to select one particular song to play at the slightest whim, (in other words, if you don't need or even particularly want a GUI interface) this could be the iPod for you. I have several podcast smart lists set up in iTunes that make me feel like I program my own radio station. Every time I refresh podcasts and re-sync the Shuffle, a new roster of news programs, tech podcasts, and audio fiction streams out and keeps me sane as I do the brainless work that guarantees me health benefits and that the bills get paid for one more month. With a few clicks of the in-line remote, I can switch to a different flavor of podcast, or to an audiobook, rock'n'roll, classical, or film scores.

Honestly, I wish Apple would go back to a design similar to the previous generation Shuffle. I never liked arm bands or belt clips, and the Nano tended to fall out of my shirt pocket when I bent over, which I do frequently, so the built-in "tie tack" clip shared by 2nd- and 3rd-Gen. designs is an ideal form factor. I'd like the remote control headphones to continue to be an option (controls are handy right next to your jawbone), but I'd like to see Apple put some actual buttons back on the Shuffle so the proprietary headphones aren't required. I have a Scosche Tapstick, which gives the Shuffle buttons anyway, but this is one third party accessory Apple should make obsolete.

I doubt I'm changing Chris Breen's mind, and I'm not trying to. But the Shuffle has it's niche and I hope it continues to evolve.

New iPod Shuffle - Apple gets a clue

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At the much-awaited September 9 Apple announcement, newly-minted organ donation cheerleader Steve Jobs and Apple surprised pretty much nobody by revving up the iPod line. The Nano muscles up in ways that will surely keep it at the top of the music player heap, and the Shuffle gets a right-sizing and pricing correction.

While not the top of the line, the iPod Nano is the real flagship of the iPod fleet, and it was given a huge boost in value with the addition of an FM tuner, pedometer, and video camera with microphone not to mention the most appealing new feature, a $20.00 price drop on the 16GB model. The addition of a camera has been rumored several weeks since photos leaked from a Chinese aftermarket manufacturer of new Nano skins with a hole on the back that could be for pretty much nothing other than a camera lens.

With the broadest range of upgrades, the Nano was the star of the show. The iPod Touch would have been had it gotten its long-rumored camera. (The MacBreak Weekly guys seem to think this is a temporary design glitch and the photo-capable Touch will come soon.) But it may be that the first item from the event to cause me to open up my wallet will be the less-sexy iPod Shuffle. Here's why:

I posted back in March (here and here) when the new button-less shuffle first came out about my misgivings on the design. While I think it is undeniably slick, the proprietary headphones with inline controls and $79.00 price tag has held me back up to now. Though I've made peace with the headphones, it's hard to spend $79.00 on a 4GB shuffle when, for only 60 bucks more, you can get all the navigation interface mojo and video playing goodness of the 8GB Nano. But now, in addition to pretty new colors to choose from, I can now choose to get a 2GB Shuffle for $59.00. I think this is smart.

Really, how many people need 4GB in a shuffle? The shuffle is a playlist based music player. You don't really need a huge chunk of space for your whole music collection in this type of player. At four gigs, it's doubtful that battery would last long enough to continuously shuffle through all the music through even once. Two gigs makes a little more sense. I'd load a Shuffle two or three podcast playlists, and a couple or three music playlists, and one or two audio books. That's probably only a bit more than one gigabyte of media.

When you buy a shuffle, you just know you are handing Apple one of the largest, if not THE largest, profit margins for any hardware product they sell. But a $59.00 price tag makes this easier to swallow than $79.00.

AppleScript To The Rescue

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I'm posting an AppleScript I just wrote which I hope might be useful to some people who listen to podcasts in iTunes. Paste the script text shown below into a Script Editor window and save it as a compiled script in the iTunes Script folder. After you re-launch iTunes, you will be able to invoke it from your Script menu in iTunes. The purpose of the compiled script is to skip forward 30 seconds in the currently playing track. Some folks may have other uses for it, but I find it very handy to jump forward quickly when certain podcasts go into "commercial mode."

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tell application "iTunes"

playpause

set _playhead to bookmark of current track

set bookmark of current track to (_playhead + 30)

playpause

end tell

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I'd like to refine it further with voice recognition algorithms so it will automatically skip forward 2 minutes any time Leo LaPorte says "Go to Meeting," "Audible.com" or "Drobo," but I confess that is beyond my skill level at this point.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug a great place to find other scripts that extend the capability of iTunes in many unique ways, Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes, a fine site run by Doug Adams.

Enjoy.

Welcome Back, Steve

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Steve Jobs, his razor stubble, and his black turtleneck will soon be returning to Apple's Cupertino Campus according to recent business news reports. That's not a surprise, as a late-June return date was announced at the time he went on his self-imposed hiatus. What IS a surprise is the he will be bringing with him a replacement liver.

My first gut reaction is some squeamishness. Not at the thought of swapped internal organs, but at the thought that investors may feel deceived about the severity of Jobs' health difficulties. Last we heard, it was a "hormone imbalance" and/or a "nutritional problem." It sounded like he needed rest and herbal tea, not an organ transplant.

I hate to say it, but I feel Apple may be lucky to elude SEC scrutiny over this. Especially after the last year, where Wall Street ran completely amok with opaque investment vehicles, deceptive and irresponsible loan practices, and probably outright lies to shareholders, the government and the public at large, we need transparency more than ever.

I respect Jobs' privacy and am sympathetic with him to the extent that I wouldn't want certain aspects of my health condition made generally known. Keeping a lid on this is understandable from a business standpoint, as there are always unreasonably wild stock price fluctuations every time Steve gets so much as a sniffle. It doesn't bother me that he kept personal health issues personal (especially since I'm not an Apple shareholder), but some investor-type people take this kind of thing seriously. Too seriously, perhaps.

While the possible appearance of deception may be troubling, it may also have been one of the smartest things Jobs could do for Apple to step down for half a year. Just as the L.A. Lakers' Kobe Bryan recently had the chance to prove he could steer his team to a national championship without Shaq, Apple has had six months to show they can run their business without Jobs calling every signal every day. Several new computers have been unveiled since Jobs stepped aside. Prominent Apple application suites like iLife and iWork have been updated and the development of the "Snow Leopard" operating system has proceeded apace and is on schedule for fall release. And, just a couple of weeks ago, a new iPhone was unveiled and sold a million plus units in it's first few days on the market.

The only possible clinker was the iPod Shuffle released back in March (which I previously discussed here and here), but just because it doesn't appeal to me doesn't mean it does not have a market.

The important thing is, Apple has shown it will not become the equivalent of the Scarecrow without a brain should Jobs disappear from the scene. Maybe now there won't be a massive selloff of stock the next time Steve has a hangnail.

OK, so maybe it's Form 1, Function 0

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I may owe Apple a bit of a mea culpa for yesterday's post. I still think the inline controls that require OEM head phones or the purchase of new (and not yet available) third party headphones with built-in controls is a dumb piece of design. But I may have been wrong about the lack of fast-forward/rewind.

I just found this Apple tech article, which was posted yesterday and says, in part, "When rewinding or fast forwarding an audiobook, you will hear a brief audio snippet that lets you know where you are in the book." So this indicates the fast-forward and rewind are possible, but still sheds no light on HOW it is possible. My guess at this point is double click and hold for FF and triple click and hold for rewind. That would be roughly analogous to current iPod behavior, but this is only a guess as I still have not found the procedure explicitly stated anywhere.

Still sounds harder than it should be, but at least it seems to be possible.

New iPod Shuffle: Form 2, Function 0

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A while back I opined that Apple shareholders should sit tight and relax even though Steve Jobs has "gone fishin'" until sometime this summer. Apple has a deep bench, I said. Don't worry. Be happy. Things are in good hands.

But then I took a look a the new iPod Shuffle.

I'm a big fan of the shuffle. I actually have three of the original "Wrigley's Spearmint" shuffles from a few years back. I've gotten moderately geeky with smart playlists in iTunes to easily create a selection of podcasts to load on a shuffle to keep me entertained and informed as I drive or walk from job to job. And since they probably have a current street value less than 20 bucks, I don't worry about a shuffle getting lost or stolen, as I would with a late generation Nano or Touch.

The new model gives us a feature I've long pined for on a Shuffle: the ability to load and play multiple playlists. It's very cool they've finally found a way to allow selection of playlists on an iPod with no LCD display. But as cool as that is, there are other design decisions that I find much more suspect.

OEM headphones only (at least for now) - Third party manufacturers will probably step in here, but with the controls built into the headphone cord, we are currently limited to Apple-made earphones. Two MacWorld writers (Christopher Breen and Dan Moren) reviewing the device say Apple's 'phones just fall out of their ears. With me, they stay in OK, but for some reason my ears start to ache after only an hour or so of listening. After some trial and error, I found Skullcandy in-ear earbuds, which are comfortable for hours and hours of use. I actually go to sleep most nights with these phones in and have no discomfort at all. So as long as it's Apple earphones only, I'll have to say "pass" on this new Shuffle.

No fast-forward/rewind? - I have no "hands-on" with this iPod yet, but I've read multiple articles and looked at the Apple website and their "guided tour" video. The in-line headphone control does, in an ingenious yet less intuitive way, carry out all the functions one would need on a shuffle EXCEPT. . . fast forward and rewind? I see no reference anywhere to how I can scrub forward or backward in the currently playing track. As I said, I play a lot of podcasts on the shuffle. If I'm distracted and miss part of a spoken word audio program, I just press and hold the "rewind" button for a few seconds and listen to the passage again. This is important to me, and is probably important to any podcast or audiobook fan. But if the new shuffle can do this, it is so far a mystery to me how it's done.

So, first glance, the score for the new shuffle is Form 2, Function 0. Was the previous generation shuffle really so big and ungainly that it needed this degree of shrinking and sleeking? I don't think so. This slicker new design seems to come at the expense of ease of use, simplicity, and one (at least to me) vital function.

This new device was probably in development well before the Steve Jobs hiatus, but I can't help but think this is a product he would not have let out the door in it's current form.

Apple without Jobs? S-e-e-e-elll ! ! !

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If Apple shareholders take the attitude summarized in the title of this post, I think they are not only missing the boat, they're also completely missing the pier.

Much breathless speculation has been seen and heard in all manner of tech and financial media as tea leaves are read in the light of Steve Jobs' announcement that he is taking a voluntary hiatus as the guru of Apple, Inc. And according to one graph I looked up, Apple stock appears to have hit a 52-week low because of, or at least roughly coincidentally with, the news that Jobs may have for the last time prowled the corridors of the Cupertino campus like one of the cats after which he names his OS's. Alan Greenspan famously referred to irrational exuberance. This seems to me to be irrational pessimism.

To think that Apple would collapse without Steve Jobs at the helm both gives him too much credit, and not enough. It gives him too much credit because it is not he and he alone who conceives of and designs products like the iPod, iMac, and iPhone. He is the guiding force, but it is not as if he is the sole functioning brain in a hive of drones.

It gives him too little credit because one need only take a single look at the rapt gaze and trickles of drool at the mouth's of attendees at any of Jobs' keynote speeches at MacWorld Expo and World Wide Developers' Conferences to know that Jobs has a forceful, charismatic personality. He has also had over 10 years at the helm of Apple to shape the "culture" (to use one of those corporate buzzwords I hate so much) at Apple, and has no doubt availed himself of every opportunity to do so. Jobs has certainly coached a deep bench of executives, and anecdotal information indicates that any Apple employee whose skin does not display a rich, ruddy tone resulting from faithful exposure to rays emanating from the golden aura of "the Steve" are escorted out of the building without benefit of sunscreen.

He also commands respect, and deservedly so. Apple's product line is surely roadmapped one to two years out, and any future CEO who makes an abrupt lurch away from the course set by Jobs will do so at the peril of losing the faith and morale of Apple's employees and the loyalty of its customers.

(If it sounds like I stole the previous two paragraphs from Alex Lindsay in this week's episode of the MacBreak Weekly podcast, it's only because he seems to have come to almost the exact same conclusion I did, though he may have stated it more concisely.)

I'm certainly no Apple insider, and I don't have a crystal ball looking into the future of the tech world. It would be extremely difficult, though not entirely impossible, to make the case that Jobs' departure would be good for Apple. ("Stepping out of the father's shadow?") But I would bet good money that any report you may have read portending doom for Apple should he not retake the reins. . .was written by someone using a PeeCee.