Apple’s New Shuffle Is Ass

I bought Apple’s 3G iPod shuffle a few days after it came out. It’s a marvel of modern minimalist design, featuring only a single button for powering the device on and off. Too bad, then, that it completely sucks ass.

Technically, it’s the headphones that suck, but the catch is that since the new shuffle is operated entirely by a tiny remote bud on the headphones, the fact of the matter is that if the headphones break, the device is rendered useless.

The problem is that Apple apparently designed this thing without any regard for how people will actually use it. What is the most common use for a small form-factor MP3 player, one that clips on to your shirt or waist, that uses flash memory so it won’t skip, and has no buttons to accidentally press? Right, working out or exercising.

It turns out the the placement of the control pod on the headphone cord is such that it is subjected to a constant showering of sweat and spittle during a workout. My first set of headphones malfunctioned after about five or six outings. Replacement headphones were $30 from Apple. Remember, you need the special ones with the built-in remote, otherwise you have no way of using the player, and right now Apple is the only ones making them. My second pair failed on the third use.

Also, this isn’t a failure of the speaker portion of the headphones. It’s clearly in the remote itself. The failures manifest in many ways: the volume shoots up to maximum or fades to silence; advancing through menus won’t work; songs won’t play or pause.

Oh, and Apple also apparently took all the negative feedback over the sharp edges on the Mac Book laptops, and completely ignored it. The edge on the new shuffle makes it extremely uncomfortable to clip on your waistband. Again, not the best design decision for a device intended to be a workout companion.

It’s really a shame, because the new shuffle’s form factor, buttonless controls, voice-over playlist navigation should have added up to a winning combination. To bad it didn’t.

$0.02 on Macworld

Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller delivered the company’s final keynote at Macworld yesterday:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday it was dropping copy protection from songs sold on the Internet and debuted its slimmest 17-inch laptop yet, but with no dramatic products or master pitchman Steve Jobs, the company’s final Macworld performance disappointed Wall Street.

Guess the pressure from Amazon’s MP3 store – where many are turning as an alternative to iTunes — finally caused Jobs to cave on the variable pricing issue, which labels have long clamored for.

Tuesday’s event produced few surprises. Apple announced a $2,799 17-inch laptop that is the company’s lightest and slimmest ever, as well as tweaks to software for home movies and photographs.

We’re heading into what is possibly the biggest recession since the Great Depression and Apple rolls out a $2,800 laptop?

Good luck with that.

The week in review

Wow. What a busy week. I’m going to just do sort of a link dump here, with additional comment exclusive to you Command-K subscribers. Premium stuff, and worth every penny you pay for it. This should also mark the resumption of regular blogging, now that I have a couple days to breathe and collect my thoughts.

There is this little companythat makes these cute little digital music players. And computers. And something called the iPhone. Everyone was wondering how they had held up amid the worsening economy. Pretty well, as it turns out.

Oh, and in the meantime, they boughta microchip design firm. That sort of threw everyone for a loop. The initial reaction was along the lines of “WTF does Apple want with a semi design shop?” Some of the speculation was that P.A. Semi’s low-power microprocessors could be modified for the iPhone or iPod. As it happens, I was briefed by these guys more than two years ago in my former life as semiconductor beat reporter. Ironically, their chips are based on IBM’s Power architecture, which Apple dumped from the Macs a while back in favor of Intel’s x86 chips. P.A. Semi’s products are aimed at hi-po computing: servers and supercomputers and the like. Not too likely that those will end up in an iPhone any time soon. But apparently, Apple does employ a number of chip designers who work with partners to tweak features to meet certain capabilities Apple’s product engineers have in mind. Still, it’s a curious play since if they wanted a bunch of chip designers, why not just hire them from the job market. Why pay a couple million per headcount to buy a whole company?

As if Apple wasn’t enough to handle, there’s a little game coming out next week that might just be, oh, only the biggest single entertainment property of the year. The Halo 3 launch last year opened the eyes of many reporters and editors to how big A-list video-game properties can be. Not only is Grand Theft Auto IV big business, it’s a game that has as much cultural relevance as The Matrix or Harry Potter.

My main preview story of the game is posted below, but before I get to that, I want to highlight two other pieces.

First is my Gameworld column on Sony’s Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. It’s a gorgeously realistic driving title, but only a fraction of what is promised when the full game comes out next year. Racing fans will love it, but I’m sure many consumers will see the $40 price tag as too high. 

What really interested me about my interview with Taku Imasaki, the U.S. producer on the game, was the vision that the title would become a platform for all things automotive: a driving game at the core, but augmented with videos of races and information about cars. 

Sony plans to add more features and pipe a steady stream of video content into “Prologue” in hopes that gamers’ interest will be redlining by the time the full game is released.

“Our goal is to become another medium for car companies, like magazines and TVs. We’re the perfect game for that and ideally we could become the MySpace or Facebook for auto enthusiasts,” Imasaki said.

Along with Rock Band and possibly Guitar Hero, it’s an example of how these connected consoles with gobs of processing power and storage are enabling games to become destinations/portals/aggregators for certain topics. Rock Band and GH do it for music, GT5 is doing it for cars. I’m sure there are other areas where it makes sense. Sports comes to mind. Take Madden football as an example. They already have a scrolling sports news ticker in Madden, why not buff that up to include highlights of the week’s games, interviews with athletes, and tutorials that show you how to use the video game to enhance your appreciation of the actual sport (I would love, for example, some breakdown of defensive schemes, which I only dimly understand).

The second piece I’ll highlight is an analysis of GTA4. Everybody knows this game is going to sell a buttload. The only question is it going to be serious buttload or just a regular buttload? Estimates from several Wall Street analysts range from 9 million to 12.5 million units by the end of this year, with most looking at about 10 million units. At that scale, analyzing the game’s sales is a little like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Let’s just call it “a lot” and leave it at that.

What I found more interesting was the question of what effect the game will have on console sales, and which console stands to benefit more, the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3? My expectation was that most people would say the Xbox 360. After all, Microsoft having locked in the exclusive downloadable content for later this year, combined with the superior implementation of online capabilities in Xbox Live, makes a pretty compelling argument for the machine.

It turns out that most people, from Wall Street analysts to industry observers who know far more about this stuff than me, figure the PS3 will get the biggest hardware sales boost. It basically boils down to two reasons: the hardcore gamers who dig GTA4probably already have an Xbox; those who aren’t hardcore gamers but love the GTA series probably got into it on the PlayStation 2, and are likely to stay loyal to Sony.

If you’ve made it this far, bless you. Hopefully it’s been worth it. I’ll leave you with my preview of Grand Theft Auto IV. Hit the link or go below the fold for the whole thing. It was a fun story to research and write.

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 (Reuters) – Beatings, carjackings, drive-by shootings, drunk driving and hookers. For video game fans, it can only mean one thing: “Grand Theft Auto 4″ is here, arrving with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast.

The latest chapter in the wildly popular and controversial criminal action franchise from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc is poised to be the biggest entertainment product of the year, with expected first-week sales of up to $400 million — dwarfing Hollywood’s biggest box-office openings.

The handiwork of Take-Two’s Rockstar game studio headed by British brothers Sam and Dan Houser, “Grand Theft Auto 4,” which will be launched next Tuesday, promises to crank up the thuggish drama that made previous installments the equivalent of “The Godfather” for Generation PlayStation.

“We also felt over the last few years there hadn’t been a great standout gangster movie. Maybe we could do something ourselves that would live alongside that stuff,” Rockstar’s Dan Houser told Variety magazine in a recent interview.