Apple has launched its new iPod shuffle today. To be honest, it’s a bit of a boring product release from Apple – a company we usually expect a lot more of.

As you can see it’s smaller than the last iPod Shuffle – Gadgetrepublic is calling it a fancy looking cigarette lighter – but there are two beefs we’ve got with it:

For one, you can have it in any colour so long as it’s black or grey. That’s Microsoft thinking. Microsoft in the 1990’s thinking. Apple is meant to give us vibrant choice with our colours!

Secondly, the smaller size means that the control unit is located on the headphone wire. This means that you are stuck with the standard iPod headphones, and any custom jobs you want to wear (for example, in-ear) are out of the question. Maybe there’ll be an adapter to come, but it’d be a bit crap to have to pay a premium to Apple after you’ve already paid for premium headphones.

Other than that it’s a pretty solid device: 4GB in size and its also got a nifty sounding audio thingy (we’re sure Apple has a good marketing name for it) that’ll tell you what song or playlist you’re on, to make up for the Shuffle’s lack of a screen. Handy, but this one just strikes us as being a bit… Boring. Not something often said about Apple products. And the control unit may (hopefully) prove unpopular and see a reversion as we did in the iPod Nano range when they changed the shape.