We know we're wicked late to the party on this one, but we really just need to take a moment to address this whole Super Shuffle thing. As you all know, Apple's distinctive and eye-catching industrial designs apparently give off copycat pheromones or something, because swarms of lookalike products pop up whenever the company has a nice-looking hit on its hands. Usually the knockoffs are at least a hair or two short of being overt duplicates, simply seeking to capitalize on some aspect of Apple's general design without cloning it outright; remember the influx of brightly-colored translucent plastic after the iMac made a splash? Or the increased in silvery and vaguely cubic PCs after the Power Mac G4 Cube touched down? Or how several MP3 players suddenly turned iPod-white-- until the iPod mini came out, at which point they went metallic and multihued?

Sometimes, though, the knockoffs get really, really close to the line. Take, for example, the E-Power, Future Power's attempt to out-iMac the iMac despite the presence of a floppy drive and one seriously ugly operating system. Or to get more recent, consider the fake iPod mini (as covered by Engadget) that faithful viewer scubus tipped us off to a couple of weeks back: the only differences are that 1) its screen has a goofy heart border; 2) it's not an MP3 player, but an FM radio; and 3) based on photos of the thing's construction, the word "craptacular" springs immediately to mind.

But even those didn't go so far as LUXPRO did with its Super Shuffle. The site's graphics seem to be intermittently unavailable (perhaps intentionally, to avoid a dead-of-night visit by a team of black-ops server ninjas dispatched from Cupertino?), but Engadget still has plenty of incriminating images accompanying its own coverage of the most blatant design ripoff in the history of this or any other universe. Take an iPod shuffle, make it a millimeter thicker, add a second slider to the back, stamp the words "SUPER SHUFFLE" on the case in a nondescript font and all caps, and blammo-- that's the Super shuffle design for you. (The extra thickness and slider are presumably to accommodate the voice recorder and FM tuner functions that LUXPRO threw in-- sure must be fun operating those features without a screen...)

Reportedly, Apple is not amused; according to an afterdawn.com article pointed out by faithful viewer obfuscatedcode, Apple reps at CeBIT (where the Super shuffle was unveiled) actually asked LUXPRO to remove the product from its display case on the show floor, and LUXPRO apparently complied once Apple's lawyers got involved-- but the Super shuffle was right back on display the very next day, alongside its marketing materials that also "looked a lot like those used by Apple."

So whaddaya think: is LUXPRO just counting on selling a ton of these things long before a judge can tell it to stop? Or was it never really planning on going into full production in the first place, and only made the prototypes to generate media buzz and draw traffic to its other products? Because the third option-- that LUXPRO really thought it could get away with this without ever being slapped with a trade dress lawsuit-- seems inconceivable if the company is run by people capable of putting on their own pants and maybe eating a fried egg without getting more than a teaspoonful of yolk in their hair.