The iPod Shuffle

Daily writing prompt

What is the best purchase you have ever made?

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I’d have to say it was the iPod Shuffle. No heavy armband or having to hold a phone and buy expensive earbuds that easily get misplaced: Songs you can upload or replace when you click onto Music, and carry with you in a miniature device–With simple controls you can use by touch without having to slide or select and remain hands free.

I was so upset in 2009 when Apple discontinued this device–which at the time I didn’t realize as a precursor to making the iPhone the single juggernaut*–

_{In slang, a *juggernaut describes an unstoppable, overwhelming force or entity that crushes all obstacles in its path. It can refer to anything massive and immensely powerful—such as a dominant sports team, a highly successful corporation, or a powerful character in a video game, or in my case, an otter case, the all-in-one slipcover for my iPhone, which has changed a whole generation towards an attention deficit disorder causing increasing difficulty in reading, writing, and who can only guess, arithmetic. (Save for the new calculator app which works wonders for doing turbo tax itemization lists!)}

–The device that miraculously replaced the camera, the desktop, the flashlight, and how we connect to the internet–starting with it’s introduction around the same time the iPod shuffle went away. Alas, everything was going to streaming, and the software loaded permanently to your device would forever be converted to a monthly subscription service and no longer held in sovereignty as our own with a 16 digit serial code for as long as we held or used the laptop, pc, or desktop computer.

So yeah, the iPod Shuffle, along with the smooth egg-shaped inexpensive clamshell smartphones, were great durable devices that kept things simple. I’ve frequently said that ‘smartphones’ kinda destroyed the telephone call. (We all know what killed the radio star.)

So while I don’t dislike the iPhone and Android phones, for they are incredibly powerful in their own right, I love changing songs and volume with the ingenious bezel control, in it’s simple design–as the best purchase I ever made. And the replacement earbuds are still under twenty dollars!