Thank you Steve for taking the "Suck" out of the iPod Shuffle... now stop messing with it!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am a runner and I like a small indestructible music player that integrates smoothly with my computer.

When I bought my first Shuffle a few years ago, it was love at first listen. The device was perfect for my needs. I could run ten miles with the light clip on my shirt or waistband and use my own sports headphones.

The second-generation Shuffle was as perfect as it could get.

My first one lasted through a year or so of vigorous sweaty running before it died. I was satisfied with my investment and bought a new one.

Then last year Steve decided that nobody needed buttons at all and created this silly little thing: the 3rd generation Shuffle.

It really has no buttons on it at all, just a single slider for power. The controls are in a little bulge on the headphone wire. This means that not only do you have to use Apple’s crappy earbuds, but you need to learn some strange Morse-code-like tapping signals to tell the darned thing to switch songs and choose playlists.

Apple was kind enough to embed some chip in the headphone wire that makes it so you have to use their headphones or proper Apple licensed third-party headphones.

Did I mention that I’m a runner? Runners sweat in copious amounts. Earbuds slip out of wet ear canals. The only kind of headphones I can use are the ones that have a headband or the ones with loops that go over my ears. Sports headphones.

Apple must have hoped that headphone manufacturers would flock to them, licensing their little control widget and making hundreds of different models to choose from. It never happened. As I considered the future death of my 2G shuffle, I searched far and wide for Sony headphones that would work.
The closest I found were clumsy adapters that fit between the cute gadget and the headphones, totally negating the Apple-ness of the device.

…then my 2nd-gen Shuffle died…

I had to have my running music, but no other MP3 players would work so smoothly on a Mac and were as small. I bought one of those silly button-less Shuffles, along with the clumsy Belkin adapter.

When Steve brought the buttons back last week, I ordered mine right away. It looks just like the good Shuffle did, only a smidgen smaller. It even has the nice features of the suckified version such as playlists and the VoiceOver feature.

And it works with my sports headphones. Just went for a 10-mile run this afternoon to inaugurate my new toy. Gave the old 3rd-gen one to one of the kids.

I love it.

Steve, please leave the Shuffle alone for awhile.

2

You couldn’t find an older shuffle to use? Hell, I’da sold you my older one for really cheap.

3

I considered it, but I’m not an eBay kind of guy and I was looking for a long term solution.

My experience has been that I wear one out every year or so, so I wanted a renewable source, and Apple had discontinued the good one. If I bought a used one, it would be a gamble on battery condition and would only postpone the inevitable.

And I wanted to give the buttonless one a fair shake. It left me unimpressed.

4

Wow, I could have written almost this rant, except that I didn’t bother with the new shuffle and just used my nano instead. I may not have found out for a while, as I don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing, so thanks for starting the thread!

5

Awesome. My four-year-old 2nd gen Shuffle is starting to throw occasional temper tantrums, and doesn’t play well with the last couple of versions of iTunes, and the 3rd gen would have stuck me with the useless earbuds, so I’ve been dreading the inevitable need to replace it. The 4th gen sounds great; the review I read said it supports multiple playlists!

6

…and how about that feature where a computer voice will tell you the name, artist and album as each track begins? Yeah, the third generation shuffle had ‘don’t buy this piece of sh!te’ written all over it, so I didn’t. When I want to listen with my running headphones, I will. When I want to listen with my noise canceling headphones, I will. When I’m offered something where I have to cut the wire and splice in a jack past the control device just to be able to play it through my portable speakers, car stereo, guitar amp, I say ‘bugger yourself, Steve’!

I also sense the ‘classic’ is on its way out, which is too bad. Yes, it’s too delicate for its own good, but I don’t want an electronic multi-toy, I want something that will store and play back as much music as I want to stuff it with. The ipod ‘touch’ is like a Leatherman for someone with ADHD.

7

Too delicate? Granted, I never take mine running or anything, but my 5th gen iPod has kept running solidly for over 4 years now and isn’t showing any signs of wearing down. The battery is even still in better condition than I expected; I was told I’d have to replace the battery after about a year, and while I leave it plugged into a power source more often than not now, it still has sufficient battery life to play a game of Zuma for a good 40 minutes or so. It’s the most faithful electronic thingy I’ve ever had.

8

Wow. I’m on my third 120 GB ipod classic in less than two years. The first one fell from my belt clip onto the bed while it was playing and never played again. The second got knocked off the table (it wasn’t even playing at the time) and just made a whirring, clicking sound from then on. So far, number three has not had any mishaps. No, I don’t run with them - I’ve got an old Nano that’s going to fall apart any second for that.

I’m not particularly hard on my stuff, despite the impression you might well get from the above. All I can say is, I highly recommend the extended warranty.

9

I have a Sansa Clip Plus for running, and i love it. It’s smaller than a matchbook, light as a feather, has a nice integrated clip, and actually has quite a bright and useful little screen for such a tiny player. Before that, i had a Sansa m250 that lasted through a good two or three years of running.

I was really quite surprised at the quality of the sound from the earbuds that came with the Clip Plus. It was quite deep and resonant, easily good enough for running. And, despite being regular earbuds, they actually sat in my ears pretty well.

Those earbuds (or, at least, the right one) gave out after about 9 months, so i invested a whole 7 bucks in a pair of over-the-ear sports earbuds. They seem to be OK, although the over-the-ear clips are a bit too flexible for my liking, and the sound is a bit tinnier than the Sansa buds. I’ve had to change the equalizer setting on the player and add a whole bunch of base.

10

That’s strange. I’ve had my iPod classic for three years now. It’s been thrown, dropped, tossed in a bag, been around the world and still works perfectly.

I just must have great luck.

11

The OP evidently does not understand the world of consumer electronic devices.

One utterly cannot just keep manufacturing a fine, workable design for more than a year or two. It has to be tweaked, revised, altered and souped up, otherwise the critics (and, evidently, large segments of the public) will conclude that it is hackneyed and out of date and ridicule it.

This is also the rule for computer software. You have to screw around with design, change colors, alter or eliminate options or at the very least come up with brand new icons every few months or so or it will become obvious that you’re just sticking with something that works.

12

You and me both. I had a 2G iPhone and now have the 4G. Both have been dropped several times (my 4G was knocked from a countertop onto a tile floor, and then from a chest-high bookshelf onto hardwood without a case on it at all) and I haven’t even had a scratch. Granted, those are solid state drives, but other people have made it sound like if they even breathed heavily on theirs, it broke.

My old ipod (came with a color display but was before the touch) was dropped and skittered down a hallway with no problems).

13

Yeah, there’s plenty of them on the secondary market. Or PM me.

14

Just to double check, we are talking about the ipod classic that is essentially a hand-held hard drive, right? The one they warn you at the store not to take when you’re running, because it’s too delicate?

I’m a little surprised, because even at the apple store, they just shrugged like that happened all the time and gave me a new one…

15

One more reason why I have not been interested in used Shuffles: the headphone jack. It has been my experience with portable electronics that the headphone jack starts to go long before the device dies.

Both of my 2nd gen Shuffles had very scratchy jacks prior to their natural demise. My old Treo suffered the same fate. In fact, this is the prime reason why I carry a Shuffle on runs instead of simply plugging into my iPhone, which is always with me—I know that a year of running would ruin the jack of my phone.

Hence, the reluctance to buy used music players.

Just because I want them to stop messing with it doesn’t mean I expect them to comply.

And normally I’m cool with the “new and improved” treadmill, but this was a case where “improved” wasn’t necessarily so.

16

Fair enough. I see new ones (in sealed original packages) on the secondary market too, though. I think that’s somewhat common when electronics go through the model-year process that Jackmannii referred to: remaining stocks of unopened older models get dumped. Next time something you like gets tweaked out of production, check it out.

17

I was considering this exact device before I caved in to buy the lame Apple buttonless wonder.
Indeed, it seemed like the only real competitor in the area of awesome lightweight players for runners.

Unfortunately, their support for Macintosh is limited: the device does not integrate into iTunes, so you are stuck with transferring music to it as if it were a thumb drive.
The big downside to that is that you have no control over the order of the songs.

Years ago I had a Nike armband MP3 player that worked this way. If I copied the Who’s “Tommy” to the device, it was likely that the whole rock opera would play in correct sequence. However, there was no control beyond that. If I removed some songs and added others, all bets were off.

Mind you, if I used Windows Media Player on a PC, then this device would have been a perfect fit.