I have a feeling they will take this idea into their other lines. Just as Microsoft and Sony are doing with their consoles. Lock out third parties unless they want to pay royalties. Or try and patent something that is required to play with your device, like the design of the power plug, or connectors (*Looks at Apple again*).

This only serves to hurt consumers and bolster Apple’s profits. They have basically rendered your Bose headphones useless, unless you buy a licence (in the form of new head phones that Apple get a cut of) to use their new device.

Hopefully Apple won’t carry this over to their other iPod lines.

Saying that, supposedly you can use other headphones, but it will just be stuck in a looping shuffle where you have no control whatsoever (I’m assuming that includes volume), so you’ll still need to keep some Apple ones with you, which sucks.

Thanks,
Joel Nichols.

But where as usually Apple just puts a nice look, and a massive price on something. This time they have gone to far. Maybe I would not mind if any third party could make their own controller, But to add this encoding chip in so they can claim reverse engineering is a bit much.

I just can’t believe people will go for it, and the fanboys will defend it. But even you think this is a step to far, So that’s something,

When I first saw the player was like wow its tiny even smaller than my already small enough 1gb shuffle and how it speaks, wasn’t till later I found out about this new “feature” and went off the device instantly.

I know apple make some concessions for good looks but just how much harder would it have been to put the headphone socket on the end of the remote control like 90% of the other companies do. I suspect that the primary reason (other than money) is that they realised allot of people bought iPod’s and ditched the “annoying fall out of your ear” headphones and replaced with proper ones that are not WHITE and thus don’t say “look at me I have an iPod and I’m cool”.