Comment Re:Boing Boing Unreliable (Score 2, Interesting) 264
Very well, then I will accuse BoingBoing and any other sites who reported on this to be grossly incompetent at basic first-year electrical engineering.
Anyone can figure this, even yours truly (who isn't even trained as an electrical engineer: Apple has added extra pins to the headphone jack in order to support things as simple as a single-button headset control on the iPhone. Clearly it was not feasible for Apple to keep just adding pins onto a short headphone jack in the hopes of cramming more buttons in.
It's patently obvious that in this case, given the number of buttons and gestures that the Shuffle supports, there needs to be more complex signals than merely having button-mapped pins into the device. And lo and behold, this is exactly what it turned out to be - an encoder chip so that the input signals can be fed into the Shuffle.
Anyone even familiar with rudimentary electronics would come to this conclusion at first glance. To go the "OMG DRM" route was either trolling, or sheer incompetence.