The New 4GB iPod Shuffle

As a regular reader of The Onion, it's sometimes disconcerting how close some of the stories actually are to the truth.

Take Apple for example. A couple of months ago The Onion released a video that included a spoof story of how Apple was planning to release a new laptop with no keyboard. You can check out the video below:





Think the concept is ridiculous? Well today Apple released a new product which could almost be the subject of a similar Onion story.

It's not a computer, but a new 4GB version of the iPod shuffle that....wait for it.....contains no physical controls. The body of the iPod itself contains only a single switch to turn the device on and off and music playback is taken care of by some buttons that are attached to the headphones.

But the Onion-ness doesn't end there. In addition to having no controls, the new shuffle is also quite a chatterbox. Your shuffle will speak to you.....that's right, speak to you....as you groove away to your favorite tunes. From announcing the name of a track to warning you when your battery is low, Apple has dubbed this new feature VoiceOver.

You can see a demo of it here:





I'll certainly be curious to get my hands on one of these shuffles, but my initial reaction is general bewilderment. In fact I still want to believe that this is some kind of joke and that those little scamps at The Onion have somehow duped the mainstream media and are taking us all for a ride.

Firstly, if you want to use your own headphones then you're out of luck because the controls are on the set that Apple bundles-in with the iPod. It's almost a dead-cert that an adapter will be released to allow people to use their own headphones, but it's also a dead-cert that Apple being Apple will charge a minimum of $20 for it.

As for the VoiceOver, it's something I'm genuinely struggling to see the value in. It smacks of technology for technology's sake, and that really isn't what Apple has ever been about. VoiceOver might be useful for a service like Pandora whereby you're listening to random playlists, but I can't imagine ever needing to have my iPod tell me the name of a song that's playing from my own library. It's my music and I know it well, so where's the value?

It may well be the world's smallest music player and these features might get a few "ooos" and "ahhs" from Apple fanboys (and I count myself as one of them), but ultimately this seems like a somewhat clumsy relesase.

After dominating the music hardware space for for the last 7 years, are the boys and gals from Cupertino getting complacent? Let's hope not.