Over the weekend I picked up a second generation iPod shuffle — an orange one. Having a respectably large digital music library — not to mention a collector’s zeal about completion — the shuffle had always seemed a largely unnecessary addition to the iPod lineup. Hell! It seemed contrary to the entire damn point of the iPod, which I had seen the sheer volume of storage available. Why on earth would I ever want to buy a screenless player with a fraction of the storage, no matter how tiny?

That was before I joined a gym. Faced with the prospect of listening to the drone of equipment over the blaring whatever pumped out of the speakers a very small device that did the one thing I needed — to play music — seemed pretty good. Wouldn’t you know it? The damned thing is good!

Owning this new shuffle has made me think about the entire iPod brand as a whole. Now, I don’t have sales figures on hand with unequivocal proof that iPod shuffles sell very well, but I’ve got a pretty good hunch that they do. And it’s funny, because Apple has essentially taken the MP3 player back to its roots, so to speak. Meaning the iPod shuffle is essentially the same device that Rio and others introduced back in the late 1990s, albeit smaller.

The shuffle is a great example of how Apple has built the iPod brand down from the top with great success. I think, again without any data to prove it, that the iPod line has made significantly more money by continuing to introduce iPods with less features. Adding more and more only appeals to a certain segment of the population: the geeks, the early adopters, and the gadget-crazed. By exploring the way people actually use these products Apple is able to find customers in the actual people who buy 90% of everything and not just the analysts screaming for more space, wireless headphones, and the handful of other unnecessary crap you might read certain folks asking for. A less confident company might give in, try to add all of the features people think they want, and watch their product collapse under its own weight.

So, yeah, I like my tiny iPod shuffle. I’m also quite fond of the new earbuds. They don’t look much different at first, but after 30 sweaty minutes of cardio mine were still firmly in my ears. I doubt the old ones would have been. Were I not going to a gym, I might not have bothered. That’s just the thing though, the shuffle fits at the gym, and so I bought one.