The New iPod Shuffle

The new iPod Shuffle is pretty cool–it’s extremely small, but it’s very attractive (almost delicious!) and definitely in line with Apple’s minimalism.

It has a new feature called “VoiceOver” in which the iPod Shuffle reads aloud the names of songs and playlists.

I wonder if this would be good for the blind…

It’s also very cheap ($79 for 4 GB!).  Technology progresses so quickly (I remember the good old days when $60 got you a 256 MB flash drive.  I now have a 16 GB flash drive for $20…)!

I wonder if Apple’s going anywhere with the new advertisement design:

For comparison, here’s the album cover for U2’s newest album, No Line on the Horizon:

Is it just me, or does Apple’s ad resemble the album cover?

Safari 4 Public Beta

Image by macewan via Flickr

Safari 4 Public Beta is out.

It is a significant improvement over Safari 3, especially in the user interface.

Safari 4 now resembles iTunes in its design elements, etc.  For example, it now has cover flow for your bookmarks–a somewhat useless feature, unless you like seeing your bookmarks (I don’t really care).

In other news, I think Apple is ripping off Chrome:

Image by Lawrence R.Y. Li via Flickr

I sold you the laptop. Do you want a right mouse button for $20?

Special edition (I’m making up for my Terms of Uselessness business).
I just found out about the iPod touch upgrade (All new itouches are basically iPhones without Edge networking or phone service. Old itouches can be made into new itouches by giving Apple $20). So I would like to make an analogy.

I am a (insert generic software company here) and you bought one of my products. Adding a few useful features is as simple as adding some code and recompiling the program. Let’s say the program didn’t have a redo feature, even though it had an undo feature. I am selling you the redo feature for $10, while new customers get it for free.

I am Apple and you bought the iPod touch. There was no stocks, mail, maps, weather, or notes functionality. You have had to rely on homebrew apps for these. I am selling you these features for $20 in a software update, while new customers get them for free.
(of course, someone’s going to hack the features into the iPod touch)

See how unreasonable this is?
(and don’t even get me started on the iPhone early adopter tax)
Wow. I’m glad I didn’t get the iPod touch yet.

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