The iPod Shuffle is a digital audio player designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It is the smallest model in Apple's iPod family, and was the first to use flash memory. The first model was announced at the Macworld Conference & Expo on January 11, 2005; the current fourth generation model was introduced on September 1, 2010.

Released on January 11, 2005, the first-generation iPod Shuffle weighed 0.78 ounces (22 g) and was designed to be easily loaded with a selection of songs and to play them in random order. According to Apple,^{[citation needed]} owners of existing iPods had often left the music selection to "shuffle", and the new iPod Shuffle was a way of implementing that in a much more cost-effective fashion. It relies on the use of an "autofill" feature in iTunes, which can select songs at random from a user's music library (or from a specific playlist) and copy as many as will fit into the iPod Shuffle's memory. The Shuffle can hold up to 240 songs (1-GB model, based on Apple's estimate, of four minutes per song and 128 kbit/s AAC encoding). It used the SigmaTel STMP35xx system on a chip (SOC) and its software development kit (SDK) v2.6, a flash memory IC, and USB rechargeable lithium cell. The STMP35xx SOC and its software was the most fully integrated portable MP3 playback system at release time and SigmaTel was Austin's largest IPO (2003) capturing over 60% of flash based MP3 player world market share in 2004. In 2005, peak iPod first-generation Shuffle production occurred at a hundred thousand units per day, at the Asus factory.