Meanwhile, what about Apple's other big hardware announcement this week? Well, to hear the competition tell it, the iPod shuffle is so insignificant a threat to their business, it's barely worth mentioning at all. Faithful viewer Don Laur dished us a MacCentral article in which every manufacturer of flash-based MP3 players quoted "claimed to be either excited or relieved" when Steve took the wraps off of Apple's first solid-state music player. So what, exactly, is so unthreatening? Its cutesy name? Its potentially dorky white lanyard? The fact that it looks suspiciously like a Bic lighter that someone dipped in Liquid Paper? What?

Well, a spokesperson for Rio claims to be "disappointed" that Apple shipped a "somewhat neutered product" and cites the lack of a screen as a major flaw, because "a blind user interface... isn't popular with consumers." Somebody at Creative Labs claims to be "very surprised that [Apple] would release a player with a limited feature set" instead of something "competitive or innovative." And someone at iRiver says the iPod shuffle is no threat because of its lack of advanced features like "an FM tuner and recorder that you can even schedule recordings to wake up, record something, and go back to sleep"-- which is just what everybody wants to do on their flash-based portable music player, we're sure.

Of course, they probably mentioned all this before they heard the news that faithful viewer Cheesehead Dave informed us was originally reported by iPodLounge: that the Apple Store San Francisco had sold out its entire stock of 20,000 iPod shuffles in a mere four hours. What this tells us is that 1) the iPod shuffle is actually pretty darn popular right out of the starting gate, and 2) those supersoldiers that Apple is breeding in preparation for the company's bloody bid for world domination in 2008 are apparently also handy retail workers, seeing as they'd have to have rung up 83 iPod shuffles per minute for that figure to be accurate.

As it turns out, of course, someone left out the sanity check and added an extra order of magnitude somewhere along the line; the corrected article now says that the SF store sold 2,000 iPod shuffles in four hours, or a far more reasonable one-every-sevenish-seconds-- which is, of course, still mighty impressive. Now, granted, those 2,000 shufflePods were sold in San Francisco during Macworld Expo, and its tough to think of a time and place that would produce greater demand. Still, though, that just doesn't sound like a sales rate that the competition can shrug off so easily-- especially since, as Steve pointed out during his keynote, the iPod mini has already cut the flash-based competition's collective share of the market in half, and if the iPod shuffle catches on, those guys are going to be hurting something fierce.

But the denial is in full force with these guys; Rio, for example, seems happy that its sales "grew 54 percent in 2004 over 2003"-- which sounds pretty good, until you remember that Apple's iPod sales grew by over ten times that factor during the same time period, so Rio's 54 percent growth is practically a death knell. But hey, there are worse ways to go than deluded, ignorant, and happy, right? And while they're busy ignoring the signs of their impending doom, we can all sit back and wait to see just how popular the iPod shuffle turns out to be in the weeks after its intro...