For instance, you can’t connect a 1/8th” stereo cable from your car stereo to your Shuffle. You’d need a special cable that doesn’t even exist yet.

I forecast a boom in eBay sales of 2nd Gen iPod shuffles.

People who don’t want to adhere to Apple’s standards are free to manufacture compatible hardware, but they won’t be able to use the “Made for iPod” trademark.

I’m an Apple user. The reason I use Apple products is that they’re generally made to a higher quality standard than the rest of the market, and Apple pays a lot of attention to UI and basic looks.

I don’t want my Apple experience cheapened by some third-rate company manufacturing junk headphones passing them off as “Made for iPod” thankyouverymuch.

Can people just get over the initial hysteria and realise that Apple is about control, but in this case it’s not the market that they’re trying to control, it’s the halo around their products that they’re trying to control.

I’m a control freak and a snob, and I appreciate the efforts Apple goes to in order to ensure that my Apple “experience” is as pleasant as possible.

The new design would slip in easily without looking closely, much like the current design. But it would also lock in place and unlock easily or under force. My current iPod headphones disconnect much too easily. Phone-like ethernet connectors are much too hard to disconnect. We need something in between.

It’d also allow for one connector to adapt to a wide array of roles. Insert mono (i.e. two-way radio or cellular) headphones in a stereo gadget, and both sides would carry sound. Insert stereo headphones in a mono device like a cell phone and again both sides work.

It there are controls, the controls follow some standard and adapt to a new role. Insert an iPod shuttle headphone in a two-way radio, and the volume control still works and the stop/start button becomes a transmit button. Headphones with mikes would work in devices that don’t have mikes and vice-versa. Every headphone would not do everything a device might need, but it would do everything it could with finesse.

Get this design taken up as a standard, and the designers could charge a tiny fraction of a cent royalty on each one and still become very, very comfortable. And the rest of us would love them and be delighted to see an end to all the various headphones that are wasting our money, cluttering our drawers and leaving us confused.

And while they are working on that, this very clever group could come up with a brilliant MagSafe-like replacement for the clunky, out-sized and downright-dangerous-on-a-laptop-when-someone-walks-by Ethernet connector. It’s big, it’s ugly, and the hard-to-disconnect design was no doubt intended as a “feature” in the early 1980s, when computers meant desktops maintained by IP professionals. It’s ill-adapted for today’s grab-and-go laptop world.

–Mike Perry, Seattle

You should get your panties in a bunch about the price of a ridiculously low functionality mp3 player being $80, when, as I said before, you could stop by walmart and pick up one that fits in your pocket or clips on your shirt just fine for about $10.