2005 iPod shuffle

After showing off Apple’s ill-fated collaboration with Motorola, the ROKR phone, at the 2005 Macworld keynote in San Francisco, Jobs moved on to the final announcement of the day. The future was digital music at Apple and elsewhere, he said. And then… the familiar pregnant pause.

He began the “one more thing” by looking at the portable music player market. The iPod’s competitors were hindered by tiny displays and “tortured” user interfaces. At the same time, Apple had discovered that iPod users’ favorite way of listening to music on their devices was with the Shuffle function. That gave Jobs and Co. an idea: “We decided to base a flash-based player around Shuffle,” he explained. That was, of course, the iPod shuffle.

It came without a display — after all, the whole idea was that your music would be played randomly, negating the need for a screen. However, it also came with an option for you to play your music in order, should you so desire.

The plan was that this would blow rivals out of the water. While competitors’ players typically held 256MB of songs and cost between $99 and $169, the iPod shuffle would undercut them in both respects. Its $99 option would come with 512MB of storage, double that of similarly priced rivals. And a $149 option would have 1GB of storage, four times the capacity of some music players that still cost more.

Add in a USB 2.0 connection to transfer your files, a special “AutoFill” function in iTunes that would randomly add songs to your shuffle, and the ability to add nonmusic files and use the Shuffle as a storage device, and Apple was set to take over the world of portable music — all over again.