RE.#85, Now who is being disingenuous, I bought the Companion in 2005 and I didn’t buy it with 128Mb or 512Mb of memory. I already had an array of San Disk Micro Cruzers which were running in the $30 range for 512mbs. at the time. So $40 for the Companion and $30 for the Micro Cruzer. Still cheaper. You also forget I NEVER pay retail. RETAIL IS FOR SUCKERS! I usually only buy stuff that is a black friday deal only any time of the year (I’m good like that (to quote you)). Your glaring ommission that the shuffle has no display so when you have 2 gigs worth of songs, you’re at the mercy of the player to randomly “shuffle the songs”. I guess playback of audio books of mp3’s arent going to happen unless you make one huge file.
Re: didn’t pay retail.
No I didn’t forget you think “retail is for suckers.” But you can’t make comparisons on one time special deals that are only found by you or on refurbs.
As to the lack of a screen on the Shuffles I guess the 30,000,000 people who have purchased them really don’t want a screen or care about selecting each song on an itsy-bitsy screen... Perhaps because they already made their play list in the order they like... Or perhaps it’s because the can’t select a song while jogging anyway.