Yesterday Apple released a new iPod shuffle, and it talks.

No really, apparently it’s just too little to have a screen (it’s smaller than an AA battery), and this is why rather than showing you what’s playing, it tells you.

How clever is that? What I’m coming to learn though, as I become acquainted with my new MacBook, is that the whole damn operation is just clever. Not in a geeky showy-offy way either, in an actual, practical useful clever way.

Why trawl through loads of windows on your desktop when you could swing the cursor into the corner and get them to line up neatly? Why change all the settings on each of your iPhone functions separately when you could have them gathered together under one button?

When I read the stories about the new shuffle though it dawned on me that perhaps Apple are too clever for their own good. A couple of years ago I got a lovely shiny 80GB iPod classic as a present and it’s still going strong. So I’m reluctant to get an iPhone (I have a phone too you see) and I definitely don’t need a shuffle.

I’m sure there are a few people who’ll throw their old non-talking shuffle aside and rush out to buy the new one, but to the rest of us the old one’s still working fine thanks very much.