Wednesday, March 23, 2011

When I say randomize my playlist I mean don’t…

I’m reading Future Babble by Dan Gardner, and came upon a Steve Jobs quote. A quick google suggests that this is the earliest version of the quote on the net:

I read Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, by Alex Bellos, on holiday. […]  Bellos has a wonderful quotation on p324 from Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, about a change made to the shuffle function on iTunes and the iPod: “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random.” Bellos compares an imaginary sequence of heads and tails with a real one and shows how we expect randomness to be more changeable than it is. Apple had the same problem with people complaining (I’ve done it myself) that shuffle gave them runs of the same artist.

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