"The design of the iPod Shuffle is so simple that it's little more than a chunk of memory with a single-chip media player attached to it," said Andrew Rassweiler, iSuppli director and principal analyst of teardown services, in a statement issued Tuesday (April 14).

The third-generation Shuffle features an improved user interface over previous generations with the implementation of a VoiceOver feature that speaks the name of a song's title and performer, iSuppli said. In all other regards, it is the simplest Shuffle yet, the firm said.

"Apple has managed to take the lowest end of the iPod line and actually further downsize it, while adding features to what had been a virtually featureless device," Rassweiler said. "Beyond the memory and controller, all the other components basically provide power, interface and interconnect functions for the memory and media-player chips."

The latest version of the iPod Shuffle contains 171 distinct parts, mostly inexpensive and tiny passive components, down from 213 components from the second-generation version, based on iSuppli's 2007 teardown, the firm said. The third-generation model also is smaller, at only 10.5-mm thick by 41.5-mm long by 27.3-mm wide, according to the firm.

Including manufacturing and battery costs, the third-generation iPod Shuffle carried a combined BOM/materials cost of $21.77, virtually unchanged from the $21.80 for the second-generation iPod Shuffle, iSuppli said.

The new version of the Shuffle includes 4 GBs of NAND flash memory, while the first edition of the second-generation model included only 1 GB, iSuppli said. The price of flash has fallen so precipitously that 4-GBs of NAND now cost only $6, compared to $6.98 for 1-GB two years ago, iSuppli said.

By: DocMemory
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