Apple Apparently Discontinues iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
The shuffle in particular seems to still have a place as a super portable player you use while jogging or biking or whatever, but was hampered in recent years by lack of support for Airpods. I get that the usage model is "just use your phone", but phones are not always a great size for this.
I've considered buying a Shuffle now as I don't really care what order the music is in, but I don't know if the Forerunner I have will connect to it (everything I've read in my cursory search specifically says "phone").
Assuming you mean Toyota 4Runner: As long as your 4Runner has an aux port, you should be able to connect the Shuffle with a male-to-male audio extension cable.
So what I do now is use an armband as a place to keep my iPhone while running or exercising. The watch DOES let you seek forward/back once you have any music app playing (this works for podcasts as well) so effectively, I use the watch as a convenient "controller" for my iPhone.
Protip if you're oncall/devops: I LOVE the watch when running because I can quickly acknowledge pages from PagerDuty since you can scribble and send text right from the watch itself. Once ack'd, I finish my run and get back to handling the page
Get it now, though. The developer has said the feature was a mistake to implement and is a pain in the ass to maintain, so it might be going away soon.
Edit - nevermind - looks like only a single playlist can be synced. That's a pretty major flaw in the system.
BTw in practice I haven't found charging an issue on my 0th gen apple watch and I use it to track both exercise and sleep. It's not "fire and forget" but neither was the iphone for a long time either.
Personally I'm waiting for another month or two to see if the next generation has enough to make me take the plunge.
The Garmin Fenix comes really close to replacing the watch and GPS from above. And it'll run for about a week between charges. If it played music, I'd own one already (even if that meant charging twice a week).
Total 1st world problem.
Does no one make that anymore?
There are still scads of these units on eBay after a quick check, so I'll probably scoop up a couple, because the Apple UI to load the simple playlist is what I use for all my other music devices, so switching to a different UI would just be more overhead for me at this point.
With some re-branding, these could be re-positioned as children's first music devices. They can be priced cheap enough to give to really young children without stressing over losing them, say $30 USD. It would still suck, but not in the same way as if a child lost an iPhone 7. And it gets children into Apple's ecosystem early, and the children can even use the UI themselves because the constrained environment makes drastically simplifying the UI possible. I think Apple is giving up an opportunity here to create an advertising platform for their ecosystem that is paid by their own customers.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/requiem-for-the-ipod-shuffle/
I personally leave my big Nexus 6P on the ground on top of my towel next to machines while I work out, connecting to headphones via bluetooth with a $40 headphone amp that clips onto to my shirt or shorts:
https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Headphone-Amplifier-Integrat...
Works well for me and the sound is great (despite the fact it's made by Creative and not overpriced autophile-ware).
Now that Bluetooth headphones are a thing I don't see the utility in the shuffle anymore.
I bet Apple views bluetooth headphones as the portable iPod killer more than anything...
When I work out with other gym customers present, I use my headphones.
I agree that with Bluetooth headphones going in the $20-30 range, the use of headphone jack-based devices will go down over time. But there are a lot of those jacks out there in the world, so it will take a long time.
EDIT: Just looked over the Fiio line. Are they using the same tech as Apple? Does the scroll wheel feel pretty similar?
Flash-based? Sandisk's Sansa (Fuze, E and C-series, Clip, Clip sport, et.al.) line has been around for a while and is good. I have a Fuze that is approaching eight years old and has been battered until the paint flaked off but it still works. They are supported by the Rockbox (https://www.rockbox.org/) firmware.
That said, I don't use it much any more as I usually have my phone with me.
I've heard really good things about a Korean brand called Cowon [2] too. Have my eyes on their Plenue line ATM. Pricey, but it's what I'd expect from high-end audio devices.
I can't imagine why. Most formally it would be "iPod Nano devices", but most people would say "iPod Nanos".
You only pluralize the words that there are actually multiple of. You may talk about a Member of Parliament, but you wouldn't have Member of Parliaments because you're not talking about multiple Parliaments. You're talking about multiple members and a singular Parliament, so it's Members of Parliament. Your city has a Chamber of Commerce, but your state has many Chambers of Commerce.
But with the iPod Nano, it's not multiple iPods and a singular Nano. It's multiple "iPod Nano" devices. So you'd just say "iPod Nanos".
Your premise is false because your examples ("Member of Parliament") are using a preposition. iPod Nano doesn't include a preposition... just a noun or an adjective. The only reason your examples work is because the noun is still being pluralized and the preposition stays the same. The object of the preposition is not the main noun in the sentence or term so it doesn't make sense to pluralize it.
I've owned two Corolla cars in my life. It doesn't make sense for me to say "I've owned two Toyotas Corolla", does it? If I cloned this site, would I say "there are two Hackers News"?
Or you can end the ridiculous destruction of the English language and realize that "Nano" isn't really an adjective in this case, but rather "iPod Nano" is the entire noun and is pluralized as such. "Red iPods" has a noun and an adjective and the noun is pluralized. If you dropped the word "iPod" from the statement you'd still have a valid sentence "I have two Nano..." what? "Two Nanos", or "Two Nano", since Nano is an adjective and can't be pluralized?
You asked "is that really how we have to say it?" and the answer is no. That is decidedly not how you have to say it. It may be how you choose to say it, but you don't have to, and most people would find it very odd phrasing indeed. If you ask Apple, brand names cannot be pluralized, so their recommendation is "iPod Nano mobile digital devices": https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
I do want to point out that no matter what Burger King says, The Onion has an article specifically mocking that line of thinking: http://www.theonion.com/article/william-safire-orders-two-wh...
Mocking rules of grammar doesn't make them incorrect. It is a weird rule, but it is the proper way to write and speak the language.
It's clear that Apple wants the Watch to be the new small scale iPod for fitness use, but I really don't need all that fancy tech and the corresponding high price of the Watch.