Computer maker ditches monitors in two sleek new products designed to appeal to the more budget conscious
If there was a theme for last week's MacWorld - Apple's biannual festival of love for all things Mac - it would be headless.
Headless in that Apple introduced two new hardware products and both were missing their monitors. The iPod - of which Apple has sold 10 million units - has a 'head', or monitor, that lets you view what is on your player, from songs to photos to contacts or whatever. From this monitor you can navigate and select what you would like to see or hear.
Chief executive Steve Jobs, in his wisdom, deduced that if people wanted an inexpensive iPod perhaps they would not need a monitor, which was the expensive bit of the gadget.
So, at MacWorld he introduced the iPod Shuffle, a tiny iTunes player (about the size of a pack of gum) that plugs directly into a Mac or PC via a USB 2 connector, just like those handy little thumb drives.
You load the songs you want to hear from iTunes and the player plays them randomly. In Apple lingo, the random play mode of iTunes is called shuffle, hence its name. Actually, it will also play the songs in sequence and by playlist, but you can use its simple buttons to skip any song or playlist for which you are not in the mood.