March 16th, 2009
Is Apple controlling too much of the new shuffle experience?
It seems people are quick to jump on Apple and label them an evil empire that wants to control your entire user experience. While that may be true for some things this whole iPod shuffle headphone chip issue may have gone a bit farther than it actually needed to. Michael Gartenberg put together a nice summary post that lays out the whole story as we currently understand it. It seems to me this headset just gives new iPod shuffle users a way to control their music experience since there are no controls on the device itself. Nokia includes these type of inline controllers with their Nseries devices to give you a faster and more convenient control mechanism, but as far as I can tell there is no evil DRM chip in them.
I don’t have an iPod shuffle to test, but from what I have read you can actually use any set of headphones you want to listen to your music. You won’t be able to control your music, but Apple isn’t preventing you from listening to your music. Apple should take a cue from Nokia and have a two piece solution so that you can plug your high end headphones into the controller unit and maybe third parties will do that eventually. It sounds like Griffin’s current controller unit doesn’t work with the iPod shuffle so maybe Apple will not allow anyone to create alternative controllers and you will be locked into using their headphones for the full shuffle experience.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to The Mobile Gadgeteer via Email alerts or RSS.
