Apple’s New Third Generation iPod Shuffle

Apple quietly released the third generation of their iPod Shuffle line yesterday. Smaller than it’s predecessor, it soon caught the attention of the internet…and not in a good way.

Overwhelmingly, people don’t like it. I agree that it is badly flawed, and I’m surprised that Apple let it out the door.

If you look at a picture of the device, what do you notice missing? Controls! There aren’t any buttons on it. Some designers at Apple decided to move them to the headphone cord.

You heard me right. The controls are on the headphone cord, meaning you must either use Apple’s headphones or buy a device that you plug-in between the device and your own headphones. If that’s not bad enough, the controls aren’t too great either…

The control box has three buttons, two to adjust the volume and a big center button that does everything else. To play or pause the music, you press once. To skip to the next track you press twice. To go back to the next track, you press three times. Need to rewind? Push the button three times, but continue to hold it the third time.

In short, Apple moved from a perfectly good user interface in the previous iteration of the iPod Shuffle to a horrid, Morse code style method tied to the headphones — just so they could release a new device that’s even smaller.

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