On January 11, 2005 at the Macworld Expo apple announced the release of the iPod shuffle with the taglines "Life is random" and "Give chance a chance". Instead of the hard drives used on other iPods the shuffle used the more appropriate flash memory. The shuffle is available in two models, the 512 MB and 1 GB version. Unlike other iPod models, the shuffle cannot play apple Lossless or AIFF encoded audio although some regard it as having one of the best-sounding audio systems of all the iPod models.

The iPod shuffle has no screen and therefore has limited options for navigating between music tracks. Users can play songs either in the order set in iTunes or in a random order, you can also set iTunes to fill the shuffle with a random selection from their music library each time the device connects to the computer.