www.apple.com/ipod/start

 Apple on Wednesday introduced a new iPod music player which the company said can speak song titles, artists and playlist names to users.

The new music player can speak 14 languages including English, Chinese, French and German. It is priced at 79 dollars in the U.S. market.

The 4-gigabyte iPod shuffle is Apple’s first music player that has the talking feature and also “the world’s smallest music player at nearly half of the size of the previous model,” the company said.

The new model is significantly smaller than a AA battery, holds up to 1,000 songs and is easier to use with all of the controls conveniently located on the earphone cord.

“The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod product marketing, said in a statement.

Apple Inc said on Tuesday it had launched an online shop selling second-hand Apple products in China, offering discounts of up to 22 percent, as it looks to beef up its business in the country.

U.S. retailer Best Buy Co earlier this month started selling refurbished versions of Apple iPhone 3G that were priced about $50 less than new ones in an effort to seek new ways to appeal to cost-conscious shoppers.

These are products that were previously sold and returned to Apple and have undergone quality tests, the company’s website said.

The refurbished products available on Apple’s Chinese website ranged from a 308 yuan ($44) iPod shuffle to an iMac computer costing more than 14,000 yuan ($2,047).

“We kicked off the campaign at the end of last year,” said Huang Yuna, Apple’s spokeswoman in China. She declined to give a figure of total used products available.

Apple has introduced similar deals in other countries, including the Unites States, the United Kingdom and Japan, for years, but second-hand purchase only makes up a small portion of its total sales.