Ok, Apple, You Can Have One Proprietary Headphone. Choose.
Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 9:39AM 
Some people have had mixed reactions to the move of the iPod Shuffle controls to the cord of the earbuds. It will indeed make an adapter/dongle necessary for 3rd party headphones to function with the shuffle. But guess what? I'm not all that frustrated, nor surprised. The real problem is, there's no standardization of Apple's earbuds across all the products.
Some earbuds have microphones, some do not. iPhone headphones and iPod heaphones aren't quite the same. Now another model has controls, while others do not. Apple, why not standardize the functionality (even if it means a microphone that doesn't do anything with the shuffle) and make one dongle or even publish an open standard, to allow other headphones to work with the device. You can make just as much selling 3rd party headphones in the Apple store, as your own. If anything, production of your own earbuds should drop in price with a single model being produced. I don't like having to stop and figure out whether I'm grabbing the right white earbuds on the way out the door.
Reader Comments (3)
Have they published a spec for this? I don't know. Do you know that they haven't?
One of the difficulties of Apple being such a "secretive" company is that they wouldn't release the specifications for new headphones until they ship the device. Otherwise, it would leak out of Belkin or whoever that Apple had some kind of new iPod (which is obviously a tablet) coming.
So they may have released the specs the same day they released the iPod. Which means that the third-parties are starting right now. They'll have stuff on the market in a few months. If this is such a huge deal, here's a crazy thought: "What until they're on the market before buying a new iPod shuffle!"
I agree about the need to standardize. Its just plain silly to have three different Apple headphones for three different Apple products. Hmm, are these for my iPhone, or my iPod, or maybe the ones for my new shuffle?? I don't want to waste time or brain cells on such things...
Yes, I agree, but all the current earbuds (maybe excluding the new shuffle since I don't have it) stink pretty bad. They need a major upgrade.