2005 has been quite the busy year for Apple, and it’s only 26 days old. Already, Apple has introduced, to much fanfare, the Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle.
Both products are designed to give users “mini” versions of the items that made Apple so popular to begin with. Sales for both the Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle have been quite strong, with waiting lists existing for both products.
However, some are discovering that while the iPod Shuffle is an effective portable media player, it doesn’t quite give you all the options that made the original iPod models so successful.
One such option that the Shuffle lacks is support for Apple’s On-Demand Playlist. Simply speaking, On-Demand allows iPod users to listen to any song on their playlist at anytime. This is quite useful when you have 5 plus gigabytes worth of music to sift through.
A report from MacNewsWorld.com offers more information:
there’s no realistic way to find a song in the middle of a fully loaded 512 MB shuffle with 120 songs or a 1 GB shuffle with 240 songs. If you know you want to hear song number 87, you could hit fast-forward 86 times, supposing you could remember the title of song 87. You also can’t look at the shuffle to see the name of a song you don’t recognize.
I own a 15 GB hard-disk iPod that I’ve loaded with 9 GB of my favorite music, roughly 200 albums. There are moments when I just have to hear Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken,” and the iPod can oblige. The shuffle can’t.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
