adam.oliner.net

Dear Apple,

As a company fond of using adjectives like “insanely great” and “no competition”, you are probably not familiar with the concept of understatement. Thus, I was surprised to discover a rather modest claim on your homepage. An image for the iPod Shuffle boasted “240 songs. A million different ways.” Because you can listen to all your songs in a random order, there are certainly very many different ways to listen to 240 songs. But a million isn’t even close.

Let me introduce you to !. He’s usually not alone, so let’s put him with 240 to make the number look shocked: 240!. That ! after a number means the number of ways you can order those items. It’s called factorial, and it means you multiply the number by itself minus one, and itself minus two, and so on. So 5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120. So an iPod with only 5 songs on it still gives you 120 ways to listen. That little excited punctuation mark is interesting because it grows really really fast.

If you wanted a million different ways to listen to your iPod Shuffle, you only need 10 songs. 10! is actually more than 3 million. With 240 songs, you have more ways to order them than there are particles in the universe. If you wanted to really make a bold statement on your homepage, you should have proclaimed:

“240 songs.
40678853636470581204935759214868853101720512591828271460697559690
81486918925585104009100729728348522923820890245870098659147156051
90573256314738159909845924475246302768811570537170462828632662123
84565433072676086125451683377796691387594517603959682174236179543
30737034164596496963986817722252221059768080852489940995605579171
99966691600404296529389679980059807998526419511950668157762205621
50448516182362921369600000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000 different ways.”

I am not sure whether to be impressed by your modesty or concerned with your math skills. Regardless, I can understand your choice; “a million” has a nice ring to it.

Insincerely,
- adam

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.