I'm having trouble working up the foam around my mouth. I wonder how many people who buy the new Shuffle will actually have a different set of earbuds they want to plug into it? Even then, for many this will be a convenient excuse to buy newer earbuds.

Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer has the best take on the mystery chip: "Why have so many of the reviews of iPods failed to notice the proliferation of these Apple authentication chips?" Good question, because if Microsoft did the exact same thing, the Internet would be on fire by now.