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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. First Airport, now this... by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. ARM by PRickard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ====

  3. solid-state memory.... by vrmlknight · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:PortalPlayer by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Yea, because people are FORCED to upgrade everytime a patch is allowed.

    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/
  5. Software guts by mr100percent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  6. Third-party OS. by jcr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."