The first mass market portable MP3 players were bizarre devices. The iPod sized Rio was the most popular. It had 16MB of memory which could hold 17 minutes of regular music, or just over 2 hours of 'talk radio' quality audio. Today's iPod Mini has over 300 times more space, in comparison.

Not much happened in the market until the iPod turned up, offering gigabytes of space, thanks to the advent of miniature hard drives. The iPod grew and grew, and now offers up to 60GB of space, some 3750 times more space than the similarly sized Rio of ten years ago.

Luminaries like Beck and Moby swooned over their devices and said they would change the world. They did, but David Watanabe makes a
compelling case as to why the iPod Shuffle could reverse the trend and bring back the hey-day of the low memory player.

Things, especially technology, often move in cycles, where the first way was the 'right' way, and then a 'new' way gives more people access to the technology. After some years, technology catches up with the 'right' way and we start using the 'old' way once more. (Consider UNIX in the '70s, '90s, and then now.)