The New iPod Shuffle: A Glimpse of Apple without Steve?

This week� Apple intro­duced the third gen­er­a­tion� iPod Shuf­fle. The low-end� iPod has been a favorite among jog­gers and gym-goers who want a small light­weight device and those who don’t want to spend a lot of money on a full sized� Mp3 player. The size and low cost do not come with­out giv­ing up some fea­tures that are sta­ples among other play­ers, chiefly a screen. In pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions this was reme­died by the shuf­fle and playlists fea­ture since it was mostly used by peo­ple who were not chang­ing play order on the fly but in this incar­na­tion Apple has upped the ante and added a text to speech fea­ture called� VoiceOver. VoiceOver is a spe­cial audio tag­ging sys­tem that is gen­er­ated by the sync­ing com­puter and attached to each track so that it can announce the name the cur­rent song, playlists or func­tions. Using VoiceOver you can select options that would nor­mally be reserved for a device with a screen.

The device has also been put on a diet being almost half the size of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion. This brings us to the next big fea­ture or lack there of. One of the first things you will notice is the lack of but­tons. Apple has moved all of the con­trols to the head­phones sim­i­lar to the ones used with the� iPhone and� iPod Touch. It works great on these devices as it serves as aux­il­iary con­trols that make it easy to use the device with­out remov­ing it from your pocket. The Shuf­fle on the other hand has only the con­trols on the head­phones. Using a series of clicks, dou­ble clicks and triple clicks all iPod func­tions can be accessed. Apple pro­vides a video tuto­r­ial and chart on their site detail­ing how the new con­trols work. Also only Apple head­phone or a yet unre­leased third party adapter can con­trol the player. Mak­ing it unus­able with your cur­rent head­phone or stan­dard line inputs such as a car aux. in.

While the VoiceOver fea­ture does seem to be a step in the right direc­tion the rest of the iPod Shuf­fle leads me to believe that this may be a glimpse of an Apple device with­out� Steve Jobs at the helm. The size reduc­tion is always some­thing Apple looks to achieve in their prod­ucts but in this case it seems to be super­flu­ous. The sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Shuf­fle is tiny in it’s own right. The lack of con­trols is a bold move that a Steve Jobs run Apple might make but in this case I don’t think it was. This prod­uct seems to be an exper­i­ment with the suc­cess­ful Apple prod­uct for­mula. Take a prod­uct, make a fun­da­men­tal change to the way you inter­act, stream­line the design and sell it as the “next big thing”. It appears to be a forced attempt at the eye catch­ing Steve Jobs prod­uct but I think it’s failed in many respects chief among them usabil­ity. The fact that Apple pro­vides a chart in order to use the new con­trols goes against the fun­da­men­tal usabil­ity require­ments that Apple has labored to cre­ate. I hope Apple sees that they may have gone over­board with this one and can use it to help future prod­ucts not be “over-designed” in a post-Jobs Apple.