Requiem for a Shuffle

Why Steve Jobs told me he loved the littlest iPod—and why we're going to miss it.
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Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod? By then—January 11, 2005—I had staked my own claim to iPod expertise, having written a Newsweek cover story about Apple’s transformational music player, and I was writing a book on it. My biggest obsession was the shuffle function. My favorite thing to do with my iPod was to shuffle my entire music collection, and marvel at what songs came next. Sometimes the segues would be so perfect that it seemed a genius deejay was behind the wheel. I compared such acts of algorithmic serendipity to the “Hand of God” chess move that Deep Blue used to confuse Garry Kasparov into thinking the computer had trespassed into realms formerly limited to brilliant humans.

And now Apple had introduced something that stripped down the product to the one feature I adored. I was charmed but baffled. Was this thing that looked like a plastic rendering of a Wrigley’s pack of gum—no clickwheel, no screen, no hard disk—really an iPod?

“An iPod is just a great digital music player,” Jobs told me. “It doesn’t have a wheel, it doesn’t have those rectangles and circles. That’s not the issue. The issue is we want to make something great at $99, so that people have a way into the digital music revolution. But it is every bit an iPod—just a different iPod.”

Those words have extra resonance today, as last week Apple officially ended the iPod era, discontinuing the Shuffle and the Nano, which Apple introduced in September 2005 as the flagship of the line. Three years ago, Apple stopped selling the iPod Classic, the last high-capacity, click-wheeling iPod. That discontinuation broke the hearts of aficionados like me who loved having their whole music library in their pockets. The only product that still bears the iconic moniker is the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone without the phone. Not that I have anything against the iPod Touch—it’s a good reminder that the iPod itself was a crucial step to the iPhone, establishing Apple as a mainstream device maker and providing the company with expertise in compact gadgetry. But calling it a true iPod is ridiculous.

As you’d expect from someone whose iPod book was called The Perfect Thing, I’m sad about all of this, for lots of reasons. Among them was the amazing creativity we saw during the first decade of the 2000s, as Apple routinely lapped digital-music competitors by fearlessly redesigning iPod models at the peak of their popularity. The most striking instance came with the Nano. When Jobs recounted the origin story to me at the launch event in September 2005, he was crowing.

“This is a huge bet,” he said, describing how once or twice a year he gathered the top 100 people at the company—“not the top 100 in the org chart but if you were going to have 100 people on a rowboat with you, who would you want?”—to figure out big strategic issues. The previous year, he said, he had opened the meeting with a speech: “Our revenues have doubled in the last two years,” he told his team. “And our stock price is high and our shareholders are happy. We have a lot of momentum. And a lot of people think, ‘It’s really great, we’ve got a lot to lose, let’s play it safe.’ That’s the most dangerous thing we can do. We have to get bolder, because we have world class competitors now and we just can’t stand still.” The bold move was the Nano, replacing the wildly popular iPod mini with an even tinier, full-featured, color-screened successor. “We call this a heart transplant—stop one production line, start another. It’s amazing, and the team has done brilliantly and pulled it off.”

In the iPhone’s 10 year history, there’s never been such a drastic reinvention.

But though the Nano was a more significant product than the Shuffle, losing that simple, low-cost music player hits the hardest for me. The iPod Shuffle was something unique for Apple: a device stripped down to a single function. It was a statement that underlined the importance of the shuffle function, something I loved so much that I actually “shuffled” the chapters in my iPod book, shipping four versions of the book, each with a unique sequence of chapters.

The Shuffle was also one of the company’s most fun products ever. As Jobs’s speech about the Nano implied, Apple in those days was willing to make drastic product changes to its most popular products, and the evolution of the Shuffle between its introduction in 2004 and its last significant product shift in 2010 shows that dramatically. The first Shuffle was a long, white plastic stick with a USB socket under a pull-off lid. Then Apple’s smallness machine kicked in, and it became a postage-sized square with a faux clickwheel—no spinning, just clicks. It was too small to handle a USB socket, so it came with a tiny charger. The third generation, 2009, might have been the most Zen product that Apple ever produced. It looked like a tie-tack with no controls whatsoever; there was even a special edition in stainless steel. You could order versions that held 500 or 1000 songs—the same number as the original 2001 iPod held. Finally, in 2010, Apple reverted to the postage stamp form factor, slightly smaller than the second generations'. And for the last seven years, that was the way the Shuffle remained. But Apple’s innovative efforts went elsewhere. The only changes came with more colors and a price drop to $49.

That low price shouldn’t be dismissed. It was a feature that Jobs took pains to boast about even on the 2005 day when he introduced the Shuffle. iPods were too expensive, he said—even for him. He told me that he’d bought a regular iPod as a birthday gift for his son, who turned 13 that year. “It was great and he loves it,” he said. But then his daughters, who were nine and six at the time, started asking for their own. “There’s no way I’m going to spend 250 bucks apiece on them,” he said, clarifying that while he certainly could afford to buy them, he didn’t think it was right to give a child of that age such an expensive gift. The Shuffle changed that. “I will go buy them one of these for 100 bucks apiece,” he said. “They’ll probably lose them in 60 days. But they’ll get into it this way.”

Price aside, the Shuffle kept alive the practice of having the computer sequence one’s music, a phenomenon that I found continually fascinating. Early in my iPod experience, I found reason to question the mechanics of shuffling, as I noticed that when I shuffled my fairly large music collection, the iPod played a suspiciously large number of Steely Dan songs. At one point, I brought up this issue with Jobs and pressed him to reveal whether the shuffle was truly random. He was vociferous in insisting that it was. He even got an engineer on the phone—he wouldn’t share the guy’s name with me—who vowed that yes, the shuffle was random. I wrote about this in Newsweek and got a huge reaction from people with similar experiences.

So it was particularly satisfying to me that on the day Jobs introduced the Nano in September 2005, he also launched a feature that one could use on all iPods to adjust the shuffle. It was called Smart Shuffle, and allowed users to dictate whether they preferred mixes where songs by artists might be clustered, or not.

“Smart Shuffle came from people complaining that songs aren’t random,” Jobs said, not needing to specify that I was the biggest complainer. “And of course it really is random, and we go talk to them and they say, ‘There’s two Bob Dylan songs right after another, how could it be random?’ and you explain to them it could happen, [and in fact] it often does. What they really want is to make sure that it doesn’t happen. Rather than argue whether it’s random or not, we can give them the outcome they want.”

Good times.

Though the iPhone I carry around all the time remains my main source of music, on those occasions when I need an actual music player, I still rely on my iPods. My main player, a 160-gigabyte Classic, has my entire music collection. But because I dread its demise—by hard disk failure, battery fatigue, or thievery—I carefully apportion its use. Reminiscent of Elaine’s decision-making process in that famous Seinfeld episode involving discontinued contraceptive sponges, before any potential outing, I determine whether the event is iPod-worthy. Other times I take along a Nano or a Shuffle.

Eventually those remaining iPods will shuffle into the great void of dead gadgetry. I guess I always knew that the acid-free pages of The Perfect Thing would outlast iPods themselves. I just didn’t realize that Apple would discover the iPod off switch so soon.

Cue up a requiem, please. And then wait to see what song comes up next.