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The Guts Of An iPod

Posted by timothy on from the transmit-viruses-to-aliens dept.

The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at this Japanese web site have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is here. The FireWire contoller appears to be TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."

6 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. iPod Copying Limitations by HalimCMe · · Score: 4, Informative

    The iPod copying limitations are not really restrictions, but rather just hiding the actual MP3 files. The MP3's can be accessed thru the command line in OS X or thru a number of graphical third party utilities, a process outlined in this Mac Observer article.

    Some more interesting (?) discussion about the iPod's internals and copy protection is over at a similar article on MacSlash.

    I'm getting an iPod myself, but not till January when hopefully they'll drop in price a bit when Apple announces their next line of products.

  2. iPod price vs. Toshiba drive price by Olentangy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I followed the link to Toshiba site. They will sell me the 5 GB little hard drive for $399 retail. Apple will sell me a complete iPod for $399.

    If anyone wants the Toshiba drive, they should buy an iPod and rip it apart. This gives them the drive, PLUS you get a battery, various ICs, an LCD display, and some decent earbuds :-)

    Guess Apple's price for the iPod isn't really a rip off.

    -- Olentangy

    1. Re:iPod price vs. Toshiba drive price by MinusOne · · Score: 5, Informative

      > Um, dude, look on pricewatch at the prices for 2.5" IDE drives. Like $150 for a 30gb.

      Yeah, too bad this is a 1.8" drive - much smaller. 5GB is currently the highest capacity Toshiba makes.

  3. Re:First Airport, now this... by mblase · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm *glad* Apple doesn't restrict itself to only in-house designs.

    True, but it's a little weird to see that the OS for this device isn't actually Apple's, but a third party's. Seems like the only thing Apple really contributed to it was the design and, of course, the iTunes 2 integration.

    But hey, it looks like a Mac product and works like a Mac product. Who really cares who actually designed the guts?

    Now if only they'd open-source the OS so that we could build our own....

  4. Re:More info on the battery? by kawaichan · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's Lithium-Polymier (SP) battery, the cool thing about this kind of battery when you compare with other types out in the market is that you can shape it into ANY size so you you can make it really really thin. I don't think it offers better performance than lithium ion though. Following devices that I know of are using this type of battery iPAQ, m505, CLIE, HP's New PocketPC and probably other handheld devices.

    --

    kawai
  5. Drivers possibilities for Linux by mbrubeck · · Score: 5, Informative
    For users wanting to play with the iPod on their Linux box, you'll need hfsplusutils, since there's no fully-working HFS+ driver in the kernel.

    First, of course, you need mount the thing. The documented way to enable Firewire disk mode is through the configuration UI in iTunes, but this TIL article has instructions on how to set Firewire mode manually. Finally you'll need to get it to work with the Linux IEEE1394 drivers. Most Firewire hard drives are already supported, so it may work out of the box. Go to the Linux1394 pages for more information.