Serenity Caldwell came to the following conclusion over at iMore:
"Much as I love the delight of the iPod shuffle line, this is the latest in a long line of moves toward making the iPod obsolete. The Apple Watch is the future for semi-offline small devices you want to listen to while on the go; the nanos and shuffles of the world are the elegant, ancient weapons from a more civilized age of wired headphones and purchased music.
Long may they live on our shelves as reminders for what we used to have."
Getting over the mediorce performance of Apple Music as a product and overall bad iTunes interface design has been hard enough. Discovering a lack of support for my trusty iPod Video or iPod Shuffle was an even larger, possibly deal breaking, blow. I would have easily left Spotify if I could sync my playlists to a dedicated device. Such conveniance could easily have saved valuable storage on my "16 GB" (read: 11.5 GB accessible) iPhone 5S. Instead my iPods is left to the wired and synced age of old.