March 16th, 2009

So what is that mystery chip inside the new iPod shuffle's headphones?

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 8:18 am

Categories: Apple

Tags: Headphone, Apple iPod, Shuffle, Apple iPod Shuffle, Apple Inc., Chip, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

[UPDATE #1: It's not a DRM chip but a singal processor that controls play, pause, skip, scan, volume up, volume down and so on.]

[UPDATE #2: Apple confirms that the headphones don't use any encryption or authentication so clone headphones are likely.]

Late last week it emerged that the headphones that Apple developed for the new iPod shuffle contain a mystery chip marked 8A93E3. Is it a DRM chip that will force those who want to make third-party headphones for the shuffle to sign up to a license agreement with Apple, or is it something totally innocuous?

Here’s the chip:

The chip is tiny, about a millimeter square, and located behind the circuitry that controls the buttons on the shuffle’s headphones.

There are two popular suggestions as to what this piece of silicon does:

• It’s some sort of DRM chip that Apple will use to control third-party vendors (even if it contains very basic encryption, Apple could use the DMCA on any company that reverse-engineered the technology without a license)
• It’s a signal processor, multiplexer or digital buffer of some kind

What’s also interesting is that Apple claims that all the gizmos on the shuffle’s headphones are also supported by the iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (120GB), and iPod touch (2nd generation). This means that these headphones (and whatever technology is packed into 8A83E3) have been in the pipeline for a while.

Either way, there are two things about the shuffle headphones that anyone planning to buy one should know:

• You can’t use standard headphones with the new shuffle
• Third-party headphones are thin on the ground (Scosche have announced support for the 3rd gen shuffle, priced from $49.99 to $99.99)

Is this chip “evil”? Until I know more I’m not going to comment on that, but I will say that personally I’d dislike any media player that didn’t allow me to use the headphones that I wanted to use with it. But then again, as devices get smaller, the buttons needed to operate them have to go somewhere.

Anyone here bought or interested in the new shuffle? Do the headphones put you off buying?