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The iPod Shuffle, which comes with the slogan "Life is random", was launched at the Macworld conference in San Francisco by Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, marking a shift by the company towards low-cost products.
"We wanted to make something that's even easier to use than the iPod," Mr Jobs told an enraptured audience at the Moscone conference centre, a short distance from the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California.
"Something happened in the iPod market - people discovered a new way to listen to their music that became the most popular way to listen to your music: shuffle."
Rather than selecting what tracks to listen to, users can select the shuffle setting on their machines and allow songs to be played from their collection randomly.
After years of cultivating an exclusive image by sticking to high prices, the success of the iPod - 4.5m of which sold over the 2004 holiday season - has driven Apple to reconsider its strategy and enter the lower-priced end of the technology market.
"We think it's going to bring tons of people into this new era of digital music," Mr Jobs said. "We're going to see some healthy progress in the next year."
The screenless, palm-sized white unit - which will initially retail for between $99 (£53) and $149 in the US - will be available in Europe shortly at a likely cost of around £100. Based on inexpensive solid-state technology, the Shuffle has a smaller capacity than its larger cousins - storing between 100 and 250 songs - but could help the iPod explode in the same way the Sony Walkman did in the 80s by bringing down the price into the reach of mainstream consumers.
Apple hopes the mainstream appeal of iPod Shuffle will boost its profits further after a bumper year in which consumers drove the company's revenues up by 34%.
The company has a small portion of the home computing market but it dominates the digital music player market after selling more than 10m iPods to date.
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DeadMan2003
