Slashdot Mirror
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."
Because I wasn't about to waste my money by tearing my iPod apart.
Can it run Linux? Can you imagine *smack*smack*smack*
Sorry.
I don't know how it is in Japan, but in Korea there are people who will pay up to 10x what an electronic item is worth just to study the design and create knockoffs. Many US Army soldiers are bribed to buy electronics from the PX and sell them to the koreans who do this. I am wondering if this is something similar...
All this to replace my good ole' 8-track? Bah. It doesn't even say Hi-Fi anywhere on it. (Hi-Fi is a technical term for High Fidelity.)
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
When digital music is outlawed, only outlaws will have digital music!
Yea, because people are FORCED to upgrade everytime a patch is allowed.
And I'm sure apple will be very sad if you crush the mp3 player that YOU PAYED FOR.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
It's a bit larger than a US nickel, smaller than a quarter - and worth about 82 cents.
sulli
RTFJ.
I'd much rather see what the insides of Steve Jobs look like.
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.
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
No warranty for you! :-O
Why are you interested in the dimensions of Chinese currency? The Japanese 100 Yen coin has a diameter of 22.6 mm.
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
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
Does anyone remember that Saturday Night Live episode with Tom Hanks posing as one of those "flea market electronics hustlers"?
Sony Guts!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The OS and UI are dependent on Portal Player and Pixo, so if you want to mess around with the OS/UI, go to them.
:)
Still, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to hack it make it so uploaded mp3s via FireWire are playble, and thus make it PC compatible
GPL Deconstructed
Here is a good article about the iPod on geek.com.
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
Just because it's karma-whoring doesn't mean it's not useful. Posts like that one are modded up because they are useful, and whether or not they're karma whores is irrelevent.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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:
... 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.
... 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.
... it just amounts to more people shouting out "here's something you can only do on a Mac."
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
In short, they need to offer things that you can ONLY do on a Mac. They've already done a few of these things
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
Plus, the iPod is all shiny. I like shiny.
Reply from Apple:
Thank you for your interest in the iPod. We appreciate the input of users such as yourself. Unfortunately, we have no plans to support your platform at this time. We would like to direct you to our online Apple Store and our selection of the popular iBook laptops.
- Department of Irony
I think this could be Apple's attempt to promote their personal computers through a device that requires an Apple. Intel has been trying to do this with their consumer electronics line for the past 2 years. They failed miserably. Hopefully Apple does it right this time.
Hardware agnostic means the device holds the view that the ultimate hardware platform is unknown and probably unknowable.
If the design is good, then the OS and drivers and everything above the OS does not know and does not have the means to know what the hardware is.
That seems to be a good enough description for agnostic, doesn't it? It's an analogy, and not a 100% fit.
GPL Deconstructed
.
inside the US.
So the rest of the world will laught at the US and still uses it.
When you connect to the Mac in trouble state, it is lovely and others
The forcing Sad iPod was indicated. One time to try seeing you want
It will do also the air, but the one which is not seen happy is
I love you babelfish!
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.
USB can put out 500mA to power a device. A microdrive draws 300mA during a constant read, and i believe peaks at 500mA during spinup. So it would be fine to power it off USB.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
When the iPod first came out, it was decried as yet another soon-to-be-discontinued Apple experiment. It was called over-priced and under-valued. Many were the posts that blasted it as too niche for even Apples niche market. Now, suddenly, we hear people asking for a Windows version of iTunes, and can it run Linux (or BSD). We hear that the drive it uses retails for the same as the iPod itself. The iPod may in fact be the breakthrough that Jobs claims it is (ok, maybe not, but closer than people thought it was a week ago). Here's why -
Anyone who may have been considering purchasing a Toshiba MK5002MAL will now give MUCH greater consideration to buying an iPod instead. I know it's not as easy to switch out as a 'true' PCMCIA device, but even if you don't have a Mac, you can still use it as a FW drive. This will drive sales up considerably - there is a market for it outside the Mac world even without iTunes and its MP3 capabilities. And how long before someone hacks it, makes it work with other OSes.
Know what I think? I think Apple SHOULD release a Windows version of iTunes, and CHARGE FOR IT! How long have Mac users had to pay extra to play with Windows? VPC, SoftWindows, Orange Micro PCI adapter cards, MacLink, the list goes on. Well, you know what, Windows users? If you want the ease, the function, and yes, the glitz and shiny baubles, then BUY APPLE! Or else commence hacking...
In addition, one easter egg has already been discovered - the game Breakout! is hidden within. MacAddict reports on it, as does MacityNet. Who knows what other goodies lurk within, or that Apple will release for it. I, for one, do not believe that an MP3 player is all that Apple has planned for it. We've had a few pleasant surprises since it's previewing, who knows what will happen once it's released to the general public. I, for one, want one VERY much.
Santa? I've been a REAL good boy this year, I swear...
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
If you read http://www.macobserver.com/article/2001/10/29.4.sh tml you will see that the music folder is just a hidden folder. To write a PC tool to use the iPod means:
Firewire hard disk ability
HFS+ (I think) capability
I suspect Linux people may get this first, if only because Darwin and Linux have HFS+ support and Windows doesn't (yet).
GPL Deconstructed
So, you think that what is the law in the US tomorrow won't be the law in your country the day after, eh?
Well, we still don't have something like the DMCA here in Europe.
And if I want to buy a regioncode free DVD-player I can buy one almost anywhere.
There is no law which makes this illegal.
Second, don't forget that most European country's don't have the best government money can buy (-; .
If you want to be free then don't move to the USA.
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?
If the CPU is cheaper than AMD's, why is an entry level Mac 50% more expensive than an entry AMD or Intel?
Okay, so maybe I don't know enough to judge, but somewhere some component is raising the cost... and if the hard drive, memory, video, and CPU aren't it... maybe it's the chipset and drivers, in which case using the NForce and NVIDIA drivers may drive the cost down of the system by $100? Who knows except Apple?
GPL Deconstructed
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/
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.
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.
Apple will not upgrade thier players to do that.
First, mp3 is built into their iTunes encoder, along with AIFF. It's a good format to them.
Second, Steve Jobs said he does not believe technology will prevent piracy. "It's a behavorial issue, not a technology issue." On every iPod box, there is a label inside saying "Don't Steal Music."
I would be VERY suprised if they put in some form of circumvention. Maybe if the guard changes in 10 years...
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...
Do lithium polymer cells have any nasty "memory" characteristics like Nickel-Cadmium cells do?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
FYI
We're closing down our forums for about 30 minutes due to extremely high traffic. Our higher-capacity server is ready, and we will move to it in the next few days, which should prevent problems like this.
Thanks for your patience.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
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. . .
Yep, lost that 90 day warranty. I suspect anything that survives shipping lasts 90 days.
It worries me a bit that they put such a short warantee on it. Apple knows how to set warantees. The early Airport base stations had a huge failure rate after just over one year. (Bad capacitors. Thank goodness a google search and a trip to radio shack will get you back in business.)
Well, it looks nice and it seems to have the capacity to be an excellent mp3 player, but it has no other storage capabilities; which is what the iPod offers. iPod *matches* all those features, plus offers 4.9gb more storage, 30x faster transfer speed, recharging through the Firewire port, the ability to boot off the device, as well as use it as a firewire disk.
Otherwise, the iAudio is much better as a small portable mp3 player; 10 hours of playback with 2 hours of music? Just a little unbalanced.
GPL Deconstructed
My first thought was "ask a Nomad owner"... I own a USB RIO (500) and I gotta say, the speed of the USB connection is a pain even for filling the 64MB of that little machine's memory. I can't imagine what it'd be like to use USB to load a 20GB Nomad!
That having been said though, if the ARM processor that runs the iPod has a USB controller built in (I don't know much about such things), then why not inculde a USB connection for all the machines out there that do not have firewire ports but do have USB ports? Now, it really wasn't that long ago that there were shipping Macs that didn't have firewire (many of the iMacs in use out there do not and they're probably in the homes of the target market for the iPod...and then there are a whole bunch of Powerbooks and iBooks...again the owners of which are Apple's target market.) Beyond all those machines, there are a lot of PC's out there that do not have firewire but do have USB ports...
That brings me to a point that many others have said before me, so at risk of being moded-down for being redundant, it seems that apple could really sell a lot of these little units if they were PC/Windows/Linux friendly. The iPod is so close to perfect in so many ways that it makes some of the flaws it does have stand out more than they might otherwise.
But those are just my thoughts...
-t
Let's just hope there is no "burning powerbook adapter" issue with this thing...
I know what the memory effect is, and how to minimize it with NiCads. I was asking whether Lithium Polymer batteries have the problem.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It will work on other platforms, but you won't get any help from Apple. What you need is some utility that supports the HFS+ format, a Firewire card and the drivers to go with it. Now all you have to do is mount the drive and copy the files using the expected directory layout.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well, we still don't have something like the DMCA here in Europe.
Depends on what part of Europe. Unfortunately, if your country is a signatory to the convention regarding intellectual property (I wanted to say berne Convention, but I'm not sure that's correct), then your government may be obliged to pass a law equivalent to whatever idiot legislation we pass here to "protect" copyright owners.
Great idea, but someone beat you to it ;)
Apricorn has a USB drive thats powered exclusivly by the USB cable - it's has a battery for a bit of a boost during spinup. http://www.apricorn.com/ezstorage.html
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
If your Canadian, there is info about the effort to bring DMCA-style fascism to Canada, read here:http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167203.html
.gc.ca info here
and
what about Macintosh Jr. -- "The power to crush the other kids."
I've been using Wintel (and Lintel) machines from about the P90 on (Atari ST's and Timex Sinclairs before that). I just ordered a Powerbook. I've never had a Mac before but look forward to the switch, both the form factor and features of the Powerbook and OSX itself have convinced me to switch.
I'm tired of all the crap I put up with when working on PC's (and I've worked on lots of different PC's, having to work on not only my own machines but also machines at work and friends machines). Also, the Mach core of OSX really appeals to me and I love the ability to have a well put together Unix environment (I'm especially fond of the OSX packaging structure).
I'll still keep my old Wintel machines and use them as Linux servers, but I look forward to using OSX as a primary development environment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Streaming audio data from a disk really doesn't demand much in the way of bandwidth or low seek times. I would expect that a user wouldn't even notice a half-second seek time when loading up an MP3 to play.
Is there a benefit to be had from running the disk in a "minimal performance" mode? Hopefully, someone perusing this discussion will have some answers to the following:
1) Does the rotational speed of the disk have any significant effect on its power draw?
2) If so, is it feasible for a disk to be operated at a lower RPM when it's on battery power than when it's plugged into a power supply?
3) If so, how slow can a disk spin, and still be reliably read by the pickup head?
4) I've heard of disks that use the kinetic energy of the spinning platter to supply the power to park the heads. Would it be reasonable to dump any excess energy into a capacitor, and use that charge to start the platters rotating when you want to access the disk again?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I find ARM interesting. It is well on its way to be the worlds leading processor architecture. It is already used in 70-80% of mobile phones. Recently Microsoft stopped supporting Hitachi, MIPS chips for Pocket PC2002 and only supports ARM chips now. Palm already announced they would be using ARM in future.
ARM is an intellectual property company that licences it's processor architecture to semiconductor manufacturers. Intel pay an initial licence fee for the ARM architecture and pay royalties to ARM. Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments (for Digital Signal Processors) are unique in having architecture licences from ARM which allow them to add their own value through modifications to the basic ARM architecture, whilst other manufacturers can only produce the original ARM designs.
Intel originally purchased StrongARM from Digital, which had the first architecture licence from ARM, but Intel has been buying new architecture licences as well as normal licences from ARM. Intel's new ARM architecture is called Xscale which which will replace StrongARM.
Rip!Go looks like an excellent mp3 player device, maybe even better than the RioVolt.
It isn't an iPod. Sure you can store 185mb of data on a mCDR, but it's not like this thing can actually *burn* on the fly with it's USB port or something.
The whole hype about the iPod is that it's a portable stylish Firewire hard drive with an mp3 player integrated into it.
The Rip!Go is a CD player with an integrated mp3 player. The iAudio is an mp3 player, only.
GPL Deconstructed
You *can* burn on the fly with this thing!
:)
However,at USB speeds, it's pretty slow. If it were Firewire, was cdrw, and less than $300, I'd be *all* over it.
As it is, I'm gonna have to look into it now
GPL Deconstructed
>a friend of mine once showed me how he was
>running Mac OS on top of Windows 2000 with
>VMWare (eww windows, haha don't worry it's for
>linux too)
This isn't really a credible claim.
There may be a MacOS emulator that
can run on Windows 2000, but it is
not VMWare.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The drive has a normal 44-pin notebook IDE connector, but pins 41 and 42, instead of being 5V for logic and motor, are 3.3V.
- 1.8" sized drive
- 1 Platter
- 5.007 Gigabytes
- 5mm High
- 15ms Average Seek Time
- ATA (1 - 5) Interface
- Ultra66 Supported [they seem to contradict themselves here!]
- 1024KB Buffer
- Rotational speed of 4,200rpm
- MTTF 300,000 Hours
Beautiful little unit...Steve Jobs said in a recent keynote that Apple prefers MP3 for digital music because it's open and interoperable and it's what people are already using. The players are out there, the software is out there.