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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, January 11, 2005
16:17 - Shuffling off
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_01_11.html#008861

(top) link
Jeff Jarvis is skeptical of the iPod shuffle's proposition to the user:

Has the iPod jumped the shark? The entire point of the iPod is that it gives you control. Hell, the entire point of media that succeeds these days is that it gives you control. But the new, cheap, cute iPod takes that control away by shuffling the cuts you put on it. Gimmick. Off target. Doesn't mean it won't sell -- it's cheap; it's iPod -- but it corrupts the Apple/iPod message.

People seem to be forgetting that if you want, you can choose to have the iPod shuffle not shuffle your songs—and play through a hand-picked playlist of your choice.

You can see the design process on the whiteboards at Apple, though, right? "Okay, so we're going to have a flash-based iPod, maximum of a gigabyte... that's not enough space to put on any meaningful chunk of your music, or even multiple playlists. What do we do?"

Well, the most obvious solution (to me, anyway) is to fill it up with as many songs as you can, and then play up whatever benefits of that small form factor that you can.

Shuffling is far and away my most preferred method of listening, and that's because on my 20GB iPod, I can put every track I own on it, select my auto-generated "Music 3+" playlist, and let it skip through it to its heart's content. I don't often want to listen to a whole album straight through; and a couple weeks ago I put together a manual playlist for the first time in years, of "Driving Tunes", and I shuffle even through that. The idea here is that you use iTunes' "Autofill" feature to pack as many randomly chosen songs as possible (from your whole Library or a given playlist) into the iPod shuffle, optionally having it weight your songs by their star rating, as possible. And then off you skip into your daily grind, letting the iPod do the DJ'ing, as there's no display for you to do anything with in any useful manner. (It's either make it small, or give it a screen. One of the two.) The device's display has been reduced and transmogrified into the slider switch on the back, which now combines the power switch and the formerly main-menu "Shuffle" control, the only control Apple feels is crucial to the playback experience, once you've accepted and made your peace with the necessary limitations on real-time control of the device.

You can have it play your playlist in the order you chose, if you want. Or you can use the shuffle switch on the back to re-randomize it at any time. You do still have control over your playlist order; it's just handled back in iTunes, not on the fly. It's "space-shifted control", if you will. Is the reduced convenience justified by that price drop? That choking and dying Apple Store would seem to indicate in the affirmative.

I would have loved, incidentally, to have an "Autofill" feature for use with my old 5GB iPod. This is just an acknowledgment of the use cases in the field, probably culled direcly from focus groups and usability tests.

If the device is going to be this small, you have to give up the iPod's famed control. Once the decision has been made to do that—once the feature set has been pared down to exclude control in favor of the #1 use case, randomized linear playback—there's pretty much the one possibility left. And that's what we've got now. Apple's putting a lot of chips on this audacious "Let the randomness carry you away" ad campaign, hoping to tap into customers who like the idea of blind playback (which isn't so very much different from how must people use their iPods, I'll warrant); I think people will go for it. Either that or they'll spring for a $250 iPod mini. Control is what the extra money gets you. And the lack of control, for some, is a feature in itself (as Glenn Reynolds says). Apple hopes to capitalize on that. It's either that or call this an "iPod Micro", which would be just the same as the bigger ones but more limited.

In other words: shrinking the iPod yet another degree and making it Flash-based meant accepting some necessary limitations on its feature set. For Apple, the choice was either shuffling their feet and defensively owning up to those limitations... or saucily trying to turn them into an asset. Damned if it doesn't look like they've found a way.

All this does is play to the needs of the customer base, firmly delineate the product line in its various strata, and create a new class of device to pander to a different kind of consumer.

UPDATE: Tim Windsor is similarly sanguine about the Mac mini, which I think was the more meaningful (in the long term) announcement today. It's a good day to be a Mac user, but it must be an even better day for someone who's just about to be a Mac user.


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