What’s the deal with putting all the controls on the headphones?
It turns out that this is a story that begins with Apple releasing its new headphones last fall for the iPod nano, classic, and touch. These headphones have a center button for playing and pausing (one click), moving forward (two clicks), and moving backward (three clicks). According to Joswiak, the headphones were the thing that made Apple’s iPod designers realize they didn’t need to put any controls on the shuffle itself. “One begat the other,” Joswiak said. “Once we [created those headphones], we saw that these controls actually allow you to do everything [on the headphones] that you could do [on the shuffle itself]—play, pause, adjust volume, even go to next or previous tracks. All those same capabilities.
