There’s a very funny and prophetic comedy bit in Steven Spielberg’s movie “1941”. A Japanese submariner is trying to stuff a bulky 40s-vintage American radio through a submarine hatch. Frustrated, he laments, “We have to find a way to make these smaller”. Making popular consumer electronics devices smaller was definitely on the mind of Apple CEO Steve Jobs this Tuesday as he took the stage for his keynote address at MacWorld 2005 in San Francisco. An unprecedented number of media folks (among them your humble reporter) gathered to witness the introduction of the latest and greatest in Mac hardware and software. The biggest buzz from the show centers around a new product, diminutive in size and price, but with very big potential. First, some background.

Apple’s hard-drive-based iPods (including the iPod, iPod Photo, U2 Special Edition, and iPod mini) currently have a stranglehold on the personal music player market – an advantage that hasn’t been affected by competitor’s fire-sales, cheap knock-offs, or “vaporware” announcements and posturings from monopolistic mega-software companies. The personal music player market presently consists of three segments. All the iPod models comprise 65% of the market, other hard-drive-based iPod “wannabes” have 6%, and flash memory based players garner the remaining 29%. You’ll remember that flash memory players use memory similar to the RAM in your computer, except flash RAM doesn’t get “amnesia” when the power is turned off. It’s the same kind of memory you see in digital camera cards and those USB key-fob memory sticks.

Anyway, flash memory has been more expensive per megabyte (MB) of space than hard-drive-based memory, but prices are coming down. The “sweet spot” of the present flash player market is 256 MB of memory at an average cost between $99 and $149. Assuming a song takes up around 2 MB of space, that 256 MB player can hold around 120 songs. The iPod mini has been attracting the high end of the flash market since its introduction. On Tuesday, Apple introduced a flash player targeting the rest of the market.

It’s called the “iPod shuffle”. We’ll get to why it’s called “shuffle” in a minute. It could just as easily been called the “iPod micro”. It’s REALLY small. It has about the same dimensions as a pack of chewing gum. It weighs less than one ounce, about as much as a stack of four quarters. It’s white, has no screen, and has a tiny version of its big brother’s click wheel. It comes in two models - 512 MB (around 240 songs), and 1 GB (you do the math). Instead of the AAA batteries prevalent on other flash players (on which you could easily spend $100 a year), it has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that Apple says will provide 12 hours of life per charge.

How do you charge the battery and load music? The battery charges whenever you’re connected to your Mac or PC via a USB 2.0 port (for fast music transfers) that’s hidden and protected by a plastic cover that also serves as the connector to a lanyard that goes around your neck. Obviously, earphones are included.

So, why the name “iPod shuffle”? Once you load your music onto your iPod shuffle through iTunes, you can choose to either listen to it in order, or in a random shuffle mode. iTunes now has an “Autofill” button with which you can, for example, easily keep your iPod loaded with the music you listen to the most.

The iPod shuffle is very aggressively priced. $99 for the 512 MB model and $149 for the 1 GB model. Good things do come in small packages.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski