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.