Annette, my wife, recently bought me an iPod shuffle, Apple’s newest release of the iconic portable music player. It was particularly thoughtful since I’m the primary moneymaker in the family—Annette takes care of the kids and the house during the day and thus doesn’t have time for revenue-generation—and she used money she made from a graphic design job to buy it for me. That meant a lot to me.

Flash and marketshare

The iPod shuffle is Apple’s first flash memory-based player; in other words, it stores its music on built-in memory chips rather than a spinning hard disk like previous iPods have employed. Because of this, flash players like iPod shuffle can be extremely small, have very long battery life, and never skip. The downside of flash memory is that it is expensive, so most flash players come with only around one-quarter to one-half gigabyte of storage (enough for about 60–120 songs), a far cry from hard disk-based players that can store thousands or tens of thousands of songs.

iPod shuffle comes in two varieties: with a half gig ($99) or a full gig ($149) of flash memory built-in. Those prices make the iPod shuffle cheaper than most of its competitors, even those with smaller storage capacities, and not much more expensive than a “thumb drive”, which the shuffle can double as. Apple, already the clear market leader in hard disk-based portable music players, has apparently decided to make a serious play for ownership of the entire digital music market, from cheap flash players up to hard disk devices with color displays, all getting their music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. (Incidentally, Apple’s music store is currently the most popular online music download service by a large margin.) The “iPod” brand plus cheaper prices than its competitors—iPods have traditionally been a bit more expensive than their competition—mean Apple is likely to succeed.

The iPod shuffle is an impressive piece of product design and engineering. It exemplifies what I like about Apple.

Most great Apple products, and indeed most great consumer products in general, aren’t great just because of sheer technical capabilities.

Less is more. Really.

The engineering cycle seems to usually be thought of as a strictly additive process: when engineers ask themselves how a product can be made better and more desirable, the easy answer always seems to be “by adding something.” Adding features, options, LCDs, LEDs, more buttons, more memory, more storage, more power.

“Why would you pay $100 for those pants when my pants are cheaper and have more pockets?”

I saw this facetiously written on a discussion group that was talking about the new iPod. This is a pretty accurate imitation of the way many technology enthusiasts think about these kinds of things.

iPod shuffle’s competitors have tiny displays. Most are practically unusable—what good does it do a user to have a one-line display that can just show the currently playing song? And yet, bizarrely, they still attempt to pack information onto them that even the full-sized iPod doesn’t show.

When was the last time anybody was walking around listening to music and needed to know, right then, the bit-rate and compression type of the song they were listening to? Several flash players carve out a portion of their already tiny screens to show information like that at all times.

“Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.”

— Alan Kay

It’s rare for designers to think to take something away to make a product better, but that’s just what Apple has done. Playing music is a simple thing and iPod shuffle is crafted to do just that: simply play music. So the iPod shuffle has no display.

By leaving out a mostly useless display, Apple has been able to reduce the shuffle’s cost and size while increasing its battery life. But here’s the thing I never expected: they’ve actually made the thing easier to use for the most common usage patterns.

User interface

The iPod shuffle is tiny—about the size of a stick of gum. It doesn’t have removable memory cards or swappable batteries, both of which would only take up space unnecessarily. It has a slider on the back to choose between “off,” “regular,” (in-order playback) and “shuffle” modes. On the front, three-quarters of the way up, it has a large play/pause button with smaller volume up/down and previous/forward track buttons arranged circularly around it.

Those are all the controls. Every one is easily operated with one hand without looking at the iPod.

The bottom cap removes (and reattaches with a firm click using captured spring-loaded ball bearings) to reveal a USB connector for attachment to a Mac or PC. The bottom cap can also be replaced with an included lanyard cap.

The iPod shuffle isn’t meant to be able to do everything a desktop computer can do, and that’s not a bad thing. The selling point of the regular iPod and iPod mini has been that they provide nearly the full desktop iTunes experience on the go: hours or days worth of music with an iTunes-like interface brilliantly modified for a small form factor. Apple has succeeded fantastically in that effort and their massive sales rate is well-deserved. The iPod shuffle isn’t meant to replace the other iPod models for most usages; it’s meant to supplement them.

iTunes

Apple’s iTunes, a sophisticated music management and playback program that is also used to download songs onto iPods, is a mature, powerful program. Without it, the iPod shuffle would be nice but severely limited. The more one uses the iPod shuffle, the more one realizes that Apple has moved all the decisions up to iTunes, enabling the iPod shuffle to thrive with an ultra-simplified interface that’s even quicker and easier to operate than the regular iPod.

The most basic way to use iPod shuffle is with the new autofill button—when pushed, iTunes downloads a new randomly chosen set of songs from the user’s library, filling any remaining space. This is how I’ve used it most. Every day or two I plug it into my computer for a few minutes to let it be autofilled with a new set of songs and give its built-in twelve hour battery a chance to recharge.

One can also tell iTunes to autofill the iPod shuffle from specific playlists instead of the entire library. This allows some other useful scenarios. iTunes’ playlists, and particularly Smart Playlists, are really the key to the iPod shuffle’s success as a useful product.

Smart Playlists and options

A Smart Playlist is a special type of playlist that iTunes keeps up to date for the user, constantly updating it to include just the set of songs that currently match the criteria specified when the Smart Playlist was created. Though extremely powerful, Smart Playlists are easy to setup.

Some examples of Smart Playlists include:

• Songs that have “winter” in their title.
• Songs by The Beatles.
• Songs by The Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, or Ringo Starr.
• Songs composed by Erik Satie.
• Pop songs from the 1980s that are under three minutes long and aren’t by Cher.
• Songs that have been rated highly but haven’t been listened to in the last two weeks.
• Electronic or dance songs that are between 150 and 200 beats per minute.
• The most often played songs that were added in the last six months.

Some other uses of Smart Playlists come in handy. Pretty quickly, iPod shuffle users will probably decide they’d like to exclude certain songs from ever being included in autofill: audiobooks, certain concert tracks, ten minute guitar feedback solos, John Cage. Fortunately, this is trivial in iTunes: make a “Don’t Shuffle” playlist, drag the undesired songs into it, then make a Smart Playlist whose criteria is “all songs except those that are in the ‘Don’t Shuffle’ playlist”, setting autofill to fill from that.

I’ve also had good success with dropping one or two albums onto the iPod and then letting iTunes autofill the rest of the space randomly. This way I get a good shufflable mix of songs to listen to on the road or I can switch the iPod shuffle out of shuffle mode, start over from the first song added (press the play/pause button three times rapidly) and listen to a complete album if I’m in the mood for that instead.

I love my iPod shuffle. I’ve owned a couple of different iPods before and always enjoyed them, but the attributes of the iPod shuffle make it so fun and unobtrusive that I find myself using it for hours every day: in the car, walking across campus, working, taking the dogs outside.

The shuffle apparently has struck a chord with many others, too: orders for iPod shuffle are already backlogged over 4 weeks.