Apple releases a new iPod nano today - and it would seem that rumors of the iPod shuffle’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
The new machine is a black or white 1GB iPod nano, with a retail price of $149 and room for 240 songs or 15,000 photos. Compare this with the $99 you pay for a 1GB iPod shuffle, which of course has the same capacity but no screen.
So now you can make a conscious decision - pay 50 bucks more for the color screen and the interface extras that come with it, or save a little and stick with the shufflicious simplicity.
And for the time being, the shuffle still has a place in the official iPod line-up, suggesting that there’s still some life in it yet.
In the UK, at least, there's been a bit of a price cut on the iPod shuffle (they're now £50 and £70, rather than £70 and £90, leaving room for the £110 nano). Probably wise; you can get unbranded 512GB MP3 players for about £35 but brand-name ones (Sony, Creative) are over £60, and I imagine that even the iPod brand wasn't enough to stop a pinch in the sales.
15,000 photos! They'd have to be pretty durn small to put that many on - 16k each? I guess that's ample for its screen size -- but the 60GB ipod holds only 25,000. Is this a file system limitation then?
@Ben: This is the small print from Apple:
"1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less. Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; photo capacity is based on iPod-viewable photos transferred from iTunes. 25,000 photos refers to 2GB and 4GB iPod nano. 1GB iPod nano holds up to 15,000 photos."
You make an excellent point. Maybe the definition of "up to" is being used to maximum effect here...