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The Guts Of An iPod
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."
IANAK, so I don't understand why they'd do that. Haven't they heard of Ebay? Are there gov't restrictions on importing stuff?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
I'm *glad* Apple doesn't restrict itself to only in-house designs. They *can* and *do* use products designed elsewhere if it can offer them a competitive advantage...
Lucent 802.11b cards, AMD based base stations, and not Portal designed mp3 player and UI by Pixo.
Now if they can only work together with AMD and NVIDIA to introduce a new low cost entry level Mac ($500 range) and use DAISY type runtime optimzation and recompilation in the OS to make it hardware agnostic...
GPL Deconstructed
Too bad Apple sold its shares in ARM... They purchased them when the Newton used ARM chips and then sold most of the investment about a year ago. I thought it was a mistake at the time - but Apple could probably purchase the entire company now for what it made selling the shares last year.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
You gotta admit, it's pretty nice. too bad it won't work on other platforms though. Why won't they release iTUNE for other platforms when they are giving Quicktime away for free? Apple make no money off Quicktime (client) but they can actually get some nice profit from this device. I know they want people to buy macs, but who would buy a mac solely for iPOD?
kawai
I know what you are getting at but Wintel boxes are so cheap now, Apple cannot possibly beat the price. OS X looks really slick now and I am actually thinking about getting a el cheapo iMac just to play with OS X, but then again, it will run like garbage on a 233mhz CPU. It is hard for average Joe NOT to attract by the low price tag, HIGH mhz number for an iPOD (which cost around same as a El-Cheapo PC). I say bring the price of the Apple boxes down and I will certainly get a mac box for fun.
kawai
This is not meant as a troll but it is a smart-ass question that I would like to know the answer to... in the article it says "The cache is made up of solid-state memory, meaning that it has no mechanical or moving parts" is their cache that has moving parts? Or is this just more of a ... 'hey this is in our product isn't it cool....' To impress the average Joe???
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I was in an SDMI meeting when that is precisely what was proposed. The drop dead codes would be encoded into CDs. The first time that the MP3 player saw the drop dead code it would set a switch so that it would only accept SDMI encoded MP3 files.
That was the first and last meeting with those loonies that I attended. The basic idea that they had was that I would spend several million dollars building security technology for them and they would pay me $0.10 per player until the royalties reached a certain point when they would buy my interest out completely for about $100K.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The word from the tech support team at Apple is that they'll barely be breaking even on iPod sales; in fact, a single tech support call would put them at a loss for the unit (which is why they will be offering web tech support ONLY for iPod).
Clearly, in light of this, they haven't designed iPod to fatten their wallets. There's more than meets the eye here.
The hard drive alone, when bought by the end-consumer, retails for $399.
Personally, I've already ordered my iPod and I can't wait to get it!
One of the underlying themes that runs through the thread anytime Apple is brought up seems to be "converting Wintel users to Mac". Does this really happen? I mean, I've periodically had to use Macs since 1984 and I don't like the interface. Never have, still don't. Sure, there are always going to be arguments going back about which one is faster, which one is easier, which one is a better bang for the buck. But I find it pointless.
Does anyone actually see people going from the Wintel environment to Mac? How about the other way around? It seems to me that Mac's market share has been pretty stagnant for awhile, and I just don't see anything changing it as this point.
This seems to be Apple trying to solidify their own market, and push out into a currently unexplored market. But even if a few Wintel users drop the $400 for the device, I seriously doubt that many are going to buy a Mac to go with it. I still see both machines at targeted at different markets, different consumers.
Face it, both Apple and Wintel are good at what they do. I sometimes think that the perception that there is a market for "converting" people between these two platforms is ludicrous. I don't think Apple thinks they can convert people to Mac with this device because I don't think that market really exists in any significant number.
Especially when you see the bitterness between the two camps.
Better yet, how about software Guts?
If Windows could read HFS+ hard drives with firewire without the 3rd party software, you could just plug it in and upload whatever you wanted.
All the music files are in an invisible folder at the root level of the drive. Very easy to copy. I don't know about adding files that way, there may be a playlist that needs to be updated as well...
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.
I hear that the company providing that OS was founded by Paul Mercer, who used to be the tech lead of the Finder team, back around the Mac OS 7.x days.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, we still don't have something like the DMCA here in Europe.
Ha! Cracking CSS can get you arrested in Europe. Still think you are safe from our corporate sponsored legal system?
As with most things (not all, but most), Europe is on the same track as the US, just a few years behind. Sit tight friend, we will bring opression to you!
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
The PC issue is hardly a big deal, Apple IPOD is going to start supporting the PC in late november, supposedly with MusicMatch as the required PC side app.
Evidently the software that PortalPlayer provides with its product is too lame for Apple to use.
Speaking of the Gameboy this could be a terrific Gamebody emulator. Surely you could store every gameboy game ever made in 5GB, and have backlighting which the True GB always lacked. If they upgraded to a colour screen and offered low cost downloads, this could be the ultimate portable gaming machine of all time, the screen is a little small, but you could also emulate the Palm on a device like this. People have been waiting ages to get a Apple PDA, probably not the best time to introduce another consumer device, but all that storage to sync home and work machines plus PDA functions like calendar and address/phonebook would be a killer product.