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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."

2 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it. by FooBarney · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have to laugh every time i hear someone in Slashdot forums or the media talk about how Apple's killing themselves by making the iPod Mac-only. True, they ARE limiting their market to less than 5% of computer owners, but there's one thing no one seems to get:

    Apple didn't create the iPod to sell iPods. They created it to sell Macs.

    Interface used to be a compelling reason to pick a Mac over a Wintel box--the Mac OS was just THAT much better. Say what you want about Windows ... for the average user, that's just not true any more. The Windows 98/ME/2000/XP experience ain't so bad. So Apple needs a new compelling reason to make users buy their products.

    In short, they need to offer things that you can ONLY do on a Mac. They've already done a few of these things ... Mac OS X's UNIX roots offer some unique features, and tight integration with iTools is great. Apple's future strategy is to make a Mac a "digital hub" ... to sell lots of little electronic gadgets for home users with a Mac at their center. Apple's key technologies (early 802.11 adoption, FireWire) are uniquely suited to tying together digital devices.

    In short, every columnist and reviewer who criticizes Apple for making iPod Mac-only is just doing their work for them. That kind of criticism is EXACTLY what Apple needs right now ... it just amounts to more people shouting out "here's something you can only do on a Mac."

    Plus, the iPod is all shiny. I like shiny.

  2. Re:I own a PowerBook G4! by stripes · · Score: 5, Insightful
    So the question is, why is an entry level 600MHz iMac *so* expensive if the screen, hard drive, memory, video, etc, are all commodity parts?

    Part could be they tend to use high quality parts (e.g. the monitor on the iMac may be small but it has far less edge distortion then the small monitors I see at CompUSA, and better color then most of them). They could get away from that by making a "craptastic" Mac, but would it help them to convince people that Mac's are better by selling them something bad? (Note: many people already think this about the iMac, or about leaving SCSI for IDE, or...still one has to admit that many parts of the iMacs are not the cheap parts that the "value" PCs use)

    Part of it may be they have to spread the design costs over a smaller number of sales. It costs X dollars to make a new motherboard chipset. If you take Apple's claim of 5% market share as fact, then a PC part has the potential of having 20 times as many people to spread the design costs and other NREs over then a Mac part. So the "northbridge" is going to have a lot more cost charged to each buyer then one from SiS. They can combat that a little by only having a few different parts there (say one for the whole iMac line, maybe shared with the iBook, one for the 1st gen TiBook, one for the 2nd gen TiBook and the G4's...), the PC market's five or so chip makers still have more people to spread the NREs over... There are also NREs for each machine. Again Apple can make that hurt a little less by only having four lines of machine and only 2, 3, or 4 in each line vs. the N bizzilian PCs, it still hurts a bit.

    Apple also has to pay more for quality control. They make a fairly wide array of products, and they all have to work together because they can't point their fingers at as many other people. If you buy an HP PC and it sucks, when you call they can point their finger at the maker of the app (most bundled Apps on a PC are not made by the PC maker, Apple tends to ship largely their own software, or software branded as theirs), failing that they can point their finger at Microsoft (or wash their hands of you if you have Linux), Apple can only blame themselves for the OS...

    Apple also seems to do more research then most places, and that costs. It also pays though.

    Lastly, Apple has higher profit margins then PC makers (except in the server market). It makes sense to me for them to trim those to the bone on the low end iMac, but who knows if they do.