About a week ago, I dissed the standard iPod earbuds as part of a larger rant on suck in general. Yesterday, Apple announced an even smaller version of the Shuffle that packs 4 GB into about half the size of the previous version. This is made possible by the fact that they offloaded most of the controls to a widget on the headphone cord.
Now, lest I veer off into slamming a product I've yet to touch--and understand that I own two Shuffles and get more mileage out of them than the full-sized version--I want to jump back about a quarter-century in marketing.
You don't have to be female, merely d'un certaine age to recall the phenomenon of designer jeans in the early '80s. Gloria Vanderbilt was the reigning Queen, with Jordache plotting its coup. I don't pay $40 for a pair of jeans in 2009 money; expecting my underpaid (single) mother to come up with two-score 1982-ish clams would have been patently ridiculous--even the brat-child edition of me knew that.
At the time, Mom said something that's stayed with me, even as Gloria Vanderbilt gave way to Ocean Pacific, The Gap, Old Navy, and countless other brand-fads: "Why would you pay anyone that much money to advertise for them?"
Now, jump back to 2009 with me, and think about the process of listening to music--or at least blocking out the ambient inanity. Today, as in the 80s, headphones are as reliably black-clad as the audience at a Goth indie band gig. But Apple, in characteristic fashion, made their headphones white. Look at the iPod ads with the human silhouette. What stands out? Yep, the white earphones. Branding, and pretty obvious at that.
Silhouette people, though, aren't really doing anything besides standing there, so they can flash their iPod--in whatever color--for all to see 24/7/365. Unlike the rest of us, who will sooner than later need our hands to do something else. The case for my full-sized model has an optional clip, but I wouldn't trust it to stay clipped. So the iPod will be more securely stashed in my pocket. And so, because I find the headphones so tinny and uncomfortable and destructible and just too darned short, the Bose buds (though still too big for my ears) will be what snake from my backpack pocket to my ears. And so--for all the world knows--I could be using any old MP3 player. Heck, I could be plugged into my antedeluvian Walkman knockoff. I just might look old enough for that, you know.
So the takeaway is that I am not effectively paying Apple to advertise their product. (Although, on second thought, anyone who knows how mortally un-cool I actually am may consider that a point in Apple's favor...) But I don't think that this is what their Marketing Department intended. So I hope--if only for the sake of the whole ecosystem of cottage industries that has sprouted up around the iPod family--that they clue in on this iteration. Because Mom's right: Paying someone for the privilege of advertising their product is pretty stupid.
