Apple’s new G3 Shuffle creates minor controversy

One of the features of Apple’s new Shuffle is that it’s controlled from the earphones supplied. This is also one of its major drawbacks, because Apple earphones are not particularly good, but now you can’t use the superior headphones or earphones that you already own. (Well, you can, but they don’t have to controls needed to change the volume, skip tracks etc.)

What makes it worse, according to iLounge, is that “third-party headphone makers will have to use yet another Apple ‘authentication chip’ if they want to interoperate with the new Shuffle”. And unless someone makes an adaptor, you’ll have the same problem using the new Shuffle with a car stereo or home hi-fi. The site says:

This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans: are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality? It’s a shame, and one that consumers should feel empowered to fight.

BoingBoing took up the challenge and located the chip:

You’d never guess it was there — a tiny chip, barely a millimeter square, hidden inside the headphone module on the third-gen iPod shuffle. If you dismantle the module itself, you still won’t see it: it’s underneath a board containing a few simple copper traces, itself minuscule, and glued to the plastic. Even the traditional iFixit teardown gallery missed it.

BoingBoing says: “Even if someone invented headphones that worked without a licensed chip, that could amount to circumvention of a digital lock: Apple could shut them down using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, provided the signal sent from the headphone buttons to the iPod itself is encrypted.”

Well, I don’t know whether it’s encrypted or not, but it may not be worth worrying, because the Shuffle wasn’t exactly designed for sound quality. And with better earphones, the signals might even be audible. iLounge says:

doing early tests with the shuffle using ultra-high-end Ultimate Ears UE-11 Pro earphones, it turns out that the shuffle still has a little background hiss — not as much as before — and that there are also situations in which you can occasionally trigger a series of high-pitched signaling beeps that appear to be the shuffle body attempting to communicate with the chip in the remote control. We heard the beeps when we tried the UE-11s in a quiet room: they lack the remote control and make the beeps a bit more obvious. Most users won’t notice or care about these sorts of things, but they’re worth mentioning.

Meanwhile, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fred von Lohmann has other complaints. He says:

why have so many of the reviews of iPods failed to notice the proliferation of these Apple “authentication chips”? If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft “authentication chips” in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), I’d think reviewers would be screaming about it.

The EFF recently published a list of cases where Apple is using DRM, which, it says, “is almost always about eliminating legitimate competition, hobbling interoperability, and creating de facto technology monopolies”:

* Apple uses DRM to lock iPhones to AT&T and Apple’s iTunes App Store;
* Apple uses DRM to prevent recent iPods from syncing with software other than iTunes (Apple claims it violates the DMCA to reverse engineer the hashing mechanism);
* Apple claims that it uses DRM to prevent OS X from loading on generic Intel machines;
* Apple’s new Macbooks feature DRM-laden video ports that only output certain content to “approved” displays;.
* Apple requires iPod accessory vendors to use a licensed “authentication chip” in order to make accessories to access certain features on newer iPods and iPhones;
* The iTunes Store will still lock down movies and TV programs with FairPlay DRM;
* Audiobook files purchased through the iTunes Store will still be crippled by Audible’s DRM restrictions.

Whether all of these are actually DRM is a bit beside the point, which is that Apple is manipulating interfaces to control or exclude competition in the market — and in the case of portable MP3 players, it may have some market power.