Shuffle Magic

Got me an iPod Shuffle the other day, damn this thing is small. But what really strikes me is the marketing wizzardry that Apple threw at it. I could see them going "okay, we need to make a flash based mp3 player, smaller then anything else on the market and below the $100 price point. But Houston we have a problem, no way we can fit a screen under those conditions."

So here come the marketeers. Looking carefully at how people (myself included) struggle to choose a song to play and resort to random shuffling, they turn a potential flaw into a selling point. Shuffling. Just what you need: not knowing what you're getting next. The biggest surprise is that it works, I've found that listening to my iPod Shuffle is actually more fun than shifting through my giant 60Gb iPod Photo music collection. So many songs I'd never deliberately listen to that turn out to be music to my ears.