The Strangest iPod Ever - iPod Shuffle 3rd gen

the concept of functionality over form is simple enough to understand and generally desired but a concept that is also too often ignored a good example of ignoring this ideal is the removal of the headphone jack that's been seen over the past half decade the first notable phone to kick it being the iphone 7 followed by the pixel line and nearly every other flagship until samsung finally would give in as well or perhaps another good example would be apple's macbook pro butterfly keyboard which is no longer being used but it was a keyboard so prone to failure i myself have had issues multiple times and have had it fixed multiple times like full replacement of the keyboard and am again of course currently experiencing issues with certain keys i press the key once it registers twice and i'm careful with my laptop i don't eat with it i try to keep it clean either i'm really unlucky or these macbooks are just inherently flawed but the butterfly keyboard admittedly does feel good to type on at least to me and the keys being so darn low gives a very sleek and thin look unlike any other laptop out there apple's moved on from this of course coming up with a kind of compromise between their older much better keyboards and the butterfly but it's an easy example of them putting form over functionality and most would have preferred it the other way around functionality over form is the idea of making a device or product as usable or convenient as possible even if it means the design won't be as nice looking or as compact and there may be no better example of apple ignoring this concept than the third generation ipod shuffle the strangest ipod they've ever made hey how's it going i'm josh from 91 tech and this here is the 3rd gen ipod shuffle completely brand new inbox never opened from over a decade ago and if you look closely you might notice something odd this ipod may in fact be the only device made by apple to have absolutely zero buttons anywhere on top there's a slider which is used to power it on right beside the headphone jack there but there's zero buttons besides the slider the jack and the clip on the back the ipod is completely clean and sleek making for a beautiful and small but also very very confusing product hi i'm hannah and i'll be taking you on a guided tour of the new ipod shuffle the world's smallest music player and the first one that talks to you when you first pick up the new ipod shuffle you'll be amazed at just how tiny it is you can clip it anywhere we were able to make it so incredibly small and even easier to use by moving the controls to a convenient spot on the earphone court it's so easy you can use it with your eyes closed the new ipod shuffle is the first music player that talks to you it does this through an amazing new feature called voice over we walk that changes so that's a brief introduction to the new ipod shuffle the world's smallest music player and the first one that talks to you before we get to opening up the box let's establish just a little bit of background the ipod shuffle line was introduced in 2005 starting with of course the first generation and it was different than any other ipod that had ever come before it there was no display there were simply buttons and with those you could go ahead and skip through your songs as well as hit play and pause and that was about it if you had a ton of music i'd imagine this would be frustrating to use but the capacity was only 512 megabytes or a single gigabyte depending on which one you got so it actually kind of made some sense and it was the perfect budget ipod for those unable to afford better the second gen would hit the september of 2006 and later would bring some color options giving us a form factor a lot more similar to what you might think of when it comes to the ipod shuffle it looks a lot like the most recent ipod shuffle except it's a bit extended out to the side due to you know hardware constraints of the time you can only make these things so small but functionally it was the same as the first gen with basic buttons and up to two gigabytes in storage along with not a whole lot else and then the march of 2009 we were introduced to the buttonless ipod shuffle third generation one of the strangest tech products ever to come from apple and not only just apple but the tech industry as a whole if we're being honest initially there were only two colors in silver or black with the option of four gigabytes and this ipod was different from others it introduced a new feature called voiceover where the ipod could read aloud the titles of songs and have all your playlist navigation controlled in this fashion while you couldn't speak back to it it was simply there to inform you and where you were in your order of songs but if you couldn't speak back how did you skip play or pause after all there's no buttons and that's where the included earbuds came in these earbuds were meant to be the sole controls for the ipod you remember these i'm sure one click in the middle play and pause two clicks to skip and then there's the volume up or down simple enough and this is what allowed the ipod to not have any buttons on the device itself and you could control it as long as these earbuds were plugged in third-party earbuds on the other hand more often than not didn't work meaning all you could do was have the ipod autoplay without any ability to skip through your music the original 3rd gen shuffle would be replaced by the colorful version september 2009 with options still in black or silver but also pink green and blue there is now both 4 gigs as well as the new 2gig option giving some more choice for those looking to purchase one of course here i have the green ipod shuffle 3 never opened and i purchased it on ebay recently for about 100 bucks usd not cheap given this device has very little practical use anymore but considering that these ipods are somewhat rare and that the used devices were not much less money i'm not complaining we'll get to some more ins and outs of the ipod but first let's go ahead and crack this packaging open to take a closer look of course it uses this painfully thick plastic which is always a pain to get open but after using my knife and struggling with that i was finally able to pull the actual box out this ipod is the 4 gigabyte model so it would have costed around 80 or so american back in the day ironically only a little bit less than i paid for it and in the same condition it would have been over a decade ago you can indeed tell this is unopened thanks to this little sticker tab here keeping the box closed well that and the frustrating retail plastic that i pulled off peeling this away we can open the box up and right away we're presented with the ipod and all of its tall green glory it's clipped to the plastic behind it so we can go ahead and put that to the side right now and then we get the earbuds intertwined with the paper here these will be necessary for operating the ipod as again no buttons so if you lost these back in the day you were probably uh kind of screwed you'd likely end up having to purchase another pair from apple to keep using your ipod behind those we get to the headphone jack to usb adapter this is quite funny looking and it's how you both charge and sync the shuffle that's right through the headphone jack certainly unique and not at all what we're used to nowadays of course we don't even have a headphone jack nowadays but still interesting to say the least past that you have the paperwork which is as boring as ever except we actually get two apple stickers at the back here that's right this ipod shuffle that would have costed you a hundred bucks in 2009 gives you more apple stickers than the currently over a thousand dollar iphone 13 pro if someone ever disagrees with you when you say apple isn't the same as they used to be you can show them this i'm mostly kidding but uh yeah it's kind of funny how much they've changed now i'm gonna unclip the ipod from the plastic and as i do that i suddenly realize that i'm bleeding i must have cut myself on the sharp plastic earlier losing blood and in extreme pain i struggled to retain consciousness as the life was draining from me fatally wounded this would be the way i go out killed by opening an ipod shuffle third generation but then i decided that life was worth living after all if only for the promise of being able to use said ipod so i went ahead and cleaned up and then wiped down the ipod because it had some blood on it things i do for you guys please make sure you hit the like button to show your support for me putting my life on the line for the sake of making videos yeah anyways now we get to the actual ipod itself and again slider and headphone jack on the top clip on the back and that's it no buttons whatsoever just a sleek skinny tall ipod waiting to be given some music to play for the first time ever if ipods are like the toys from toy story this poor guy has been waiting in this box for well over 10 years now quickly here i didn't notice this until i got a good look at the ipod but that slider actually has more use than just power here you can see it does turn the thing off but then you also have a shuffle option and a loop option every ipod shuffle has had some kind of control for this and this one's no exception there might be no buttons but at least we do have something the ipod shuffle 3 is so darn unique and everything about it is just so confusing you have to ask why why did apple think it was a good idea to just remove the buttons completely i mean it's kind of neat in hindsight to be sure but it would have been extremely inconvenient as most people would have only been able to use apple's own earbuds and if you were to break those or lose them there's a good chance you'd be out of luck in 2009 most earbuds and headphones didn't have controls like these attached to the cords as it was a relatively new thing over time of course more and more would come out with these but initially apple's own earbuds were like the only option for you and if you had a pair of headphones you really liked in the past you probably couldn't really use them with your ipod shuffle third generation there was the autoplay mode where the ipod would just start playing music but then you would have zero volume or playback control and yet at the apple event phil schiller kept using the word easy saying how easy it was to control the device with your earbuds and that the buttons weren't necessary on the ipod but there's no question this was an unequivocal mistake on apple's part one anyone with a modicum of rationality would see coming a mile away and so the september of 2010 only one year after the new color options came out the third gen was discontinued and replaced by the fourth generation which over time would get some minor color changes but otherwise would be sold by apple until the full discontinuation of the shuffle completely in 2017 the fourth shuffle brought the best of both worlds bringing back the buttons but keeping the voiceover functionality something that to be fair was pretty cool for the time and would have seemed fairly advanced 2009 was long before the days of digital assistants like siri it might not seem like it given that siri did come out with the iphone 4s in 2011 but tech was moving really quickly when it came to smart devices around the turn of the decade voiceover as a feature in general had actually been around for a little while having been first introduced in mac os x 10.4 tiger in 2005 as an accessibility feature to provide spoken descriptions for the blind or anyone who might struggle to read what was on the display so while voiceover was seen as a kind of cool new thing in 2009 it had actually been on max for a long time beforehand and it still exists today in modern mac os being a helpful tool for those who need it the voiceover on ipod shuffle can apparently speak 20 languages and it's worth noting that this shuffle was the first to bring support for multiple playlists both the first and second shuffle could only have a single one to use voiceover you can press and hold the middle button on the earbud controller and then you'll hear the title and the artist or keep pressing longer until you hear a tone to get the voiceover to tell you your playlist options battery wise the ipod shuffle was never anything crazy which makes sense given how small it is this one would last about 10 hours of play time which i'd say should be more than enough especially if the user was charging it regularly the 2gig option would support roughly 500 songs and the 4 gig model supports about a thousand this would actually be the last ipod shuffle to ever have four gigabytes as the fourth generation would solely have two gigs for the entirety of its lifetime and i suppose that makes sense given that the ipod shuffle was meant to be a budget device that's easy to bring around and if you wanted to put even more music on it you could always shell out some more cash for the ipod nano notably the clip on the back of this shuffle is super shiny because it's stainless steel just like the backs of the ipod classic not the typical aluminum you would see on most smaller ipods this is pretty unique and the fourth generation would bring back the aluminum clip there is also a fully polished stainless steel third generation where the entire ipod was made up of the stainless steel that you would see on the backs of those ipod classics meaning for one thing it would scratch like crazy but also it looked super cool very very shiny it was exclusively available through the apple store so there's not too many of these around anymore i will say as much as i dislike not having any physical buttons on the ipod it admittedly is very small and compact in fact probably being the smallest ipod ever made correct me if i'm wrong in the comments it's taller than the 4th gen but also significantly skinnier with no need for the buttons and it looks like a shrunk down version of the first shuffle at least to a certain extent that first shuffle is super interesting you have a cap that pulls off the bottom to reveal a usb connector and that ipod actually can be used as a flash drive which is kind of neat itunes would even allow users to set how much of the drive can be allowed for storing files and then how much for music but this isn't supposed to be about the first ipod shuffle i just find it all so interesting it's funny to see the entire lineup here as the first and third gen really stick out with that third gen especially just being so completely different from anything apple has ever done so before you go complaining about apple removing the headphone jack five years ago just remember it could be much much worse and with that i think i'm right about done here not too much to go over today this ipod is fairly straightforward despite how weird it is but it's also definitely fun to look at and it's it's cool that i got to get my hands on a brand new model to try it for the first time myself i quite like it even if i definitely won't use it there's not much point anymore it's just so unique it made no sense even for the time but it was fun to mess with if you enjoyed the video or found it interesting maybe hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content just like this you can follow me over on twitter instagram or even ticktalk at 91 underscore tech if you'd like to for some reason we do have a discord server as always link in the description thank you so much for watching this was a really fun video to put together i'm josh from 91 tech and i will see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: 91Tech

Views: 532,379

Keywords: ipod, ipod shuffle, ipod shuffle 3, ipod shuffle 3rd, 3rd gen, 3rd generation, shuffle, ipad, iphone, apple, 91Tech, retro, ipod classic, ipod touch

Id: yRj4lxJYGP4

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021