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Mini-iPod Mystery Drive Unveiled?

Posted by timothy on from the melts-in-your-mouth dept.

squiggleslash writes "One of the aspects of the '2G mini-iPod' rumour that's so far made it unlikely is the lack of a tiny, cheap, 2G, drive. Well, today Cornice has announced a 2G hard drive (PDF, 100k) that fits the bill. It's available for about $70 in lots of 100,000. The Mac Rumour sites are going faily nuts over this for obvious reasons. The reason the drive is so cheap is that it contains virtually no driver electronics, there's not even a memory buffer - this is the equivalent of a 1980's RLL or MFM drive. At $70 it seems unlikely that the mini-iPod, assuming it's announced tomorrow, will be under $100, but on the other hand the original iPod sold for the same price as the harddrive inside it. Here's hoping..."

18 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by GrievousAngel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can ditch my cheap-ass knock-off and get the real thing!

    --


    "Extremism in defense of liberty is more fun."
    1. Re:Finally! by jayratch · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Good question. Especially at those prices.

      Obviously, all handheld consumers must be idiots since we voted with our wallets to choose the new color models over the old AAA powered ones.

  2. lot of spinning by stonebeat.org · · Score: 3, Insightful

    there's not even a memory buffer no memory buffer means, there could be a lot of spinning which might excessive noise. just RLL MFM drive about 10 years ago.
    i dont want hear noises of the hard drive spinning in the background when I am listening to Bob Seger. :)

    --


    Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
    1. Re:lot of spinning by dhovis · · Score: 5, Insightful
      No memory buffer on the drive is no big deal if you are just going to:
      1. Spin up the hard drive
      2. Load content into onboard memory
      3. Spin down the drive

      The memory buffer on the HD itself is so the electronics on the drive can try to guess ahead what data will be asked for next. So on something like the iPod, where the HD only spins up once every 20 minutes, the buffer integrated into the drive only adds expense and doesn't help performance.

      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    2. Re:lot of spinning by Pfhor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apple puts memory buffer in the ipod itself. It has a 32 meg buffer, loads as much of the songs / playlist into it, and then spins down the drive. Apple could easily pop a small flash chip on there, that acts like the buffer, keeping the database of information on it. Sounds like a pretty effecient design to me, instead of using the minature buffer on a drive, etc.

  3. You forget a missing piece... by gotr00t · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Another important aspect of why this is a good candidate for the drive that Apple might use is because its compatible with the PortalPlayer audio processor... which is the one that the iPod uses.

  4. Why would you? by Kris_J · · Score: 4, Insightful
    My 20Gig iPod holds my entire music collection with room to spare, about 5Gig to spare I think. My mother's 10Gig will fit everything once she's pruned out some stuff she doesn't listen to anymore (I converted her entire CD collection as part of the birthday present, so she didn't have the opportunity to decide what not to bother about.)

    Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection. One of the best features is that you only need to connect it to the PC when you buy a new CD or whatever. I've owned a range of portable music devices and I'd never ever buy another one that couldn't just handle my entire library at once.

    A quick bit of math; Assume 1MB/minute, 2Gig = 2048 minutes = 34 hours. That's somewhere between 3 days and a week. I've gone a month without connecting my iPod to my library.

    1. Re:Why would you? by PepsiProgrammer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because some people dont have 300$+ to shell out on a high tech walkman that does little else

      --
      "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
    2. Re:Why would you? by plj · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection.

      Perhaps, because someonehere cannot afford the more expensive large-HD version, you insensitive clod!

      But if you insist, I can post my IBAN account number here, so you can donate the necessary euro-$$$ for me.

      --
      “Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
    3. Re:Why would you? by Cybertect · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Go to any home furnishing store and check out the size of the CD shelving units they sell. Judging by that, and my non-musician friends' houses, most people own less than 30 CDs. A cheap, 2 GB iPod would suit them nicely and Apple's going after the the non-muso market with this device (if it exists - I guess we'll find out tomorrow).

      Even if you've got a lot of music stored in iTunes, with only a couple of Gigs of data to transfer to the iPod, it would be easy to pick a few albums and load up a day's listening while you're off making a cup of tea.

  5. More likely to be $199.... by djrogers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not much of a rumor monger, but I like this one, so I'll bite. Given Apple's penchant for building quality and pricing things higher than the competition, I'd not be surprised if this were a $199 job (no pun intended). At $199 apple can still be competetitive price-wise, but avoid scavenging sales from their 10GB model only $100 higher in price. $199 is easier to swallow - and if the little baby is significantly smaller and cooler, I'd not be surprised if Apple wound up selling them to a lot of existing iPod owners too... So let's summarize - at $99 they'd likely lose money, scavenge sales from the 'big' ones, have to skimp on the quality of the device, and way underprice the competition. At $199 they'd have a nice margin, and leave more headroom for the high quality and design that could drive re-sales... D

    --
    Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
    1. Re:More likely to be $199.... by The_Steel_General · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Perfectly fair analysis, but I don't think that price will work. If the miniPod is happening, it's for people with smaller budgets and/or smaller music collections.

      $199 is too high a price point to be easily differentiated from the price for the regular iPod. They won't cannibalize from the iPod because they won't sell: Folks who can set aside $199 for a music player will be able to set aside another $100 for the full version. Especially if they do the math and realize they get five times the songs for a 33% increase in price.

      Consider further that Apple doesn't want you to do the math. If you start looking at tradeoffs and dollars per minute of music, you might realize that you can get a better deal on a flash memory player or one of those Dell things. Apple makes their money on the Cool Factor, and cold hard logic is dangerous to their bottom line.

      $99 breaks the three-digit psychological barrier, and is something that many folks could scrounge out easily -- without thinking. A little voice might try to say that it's more expensive, but they'll be thinking of Courtney Love playing the new Nirvana song from her iPod and all those other rock stars who can't live without their iPods and -- sure, I can afford this, I need a player anyway. Maybe I'll get one for the wife, too.

      I was expecting the whole miniPod rumor to blow away, like the PDA they were supposed to come out with a couple of years ago. The existence of the small drives makes it a lot more likely. If it does happen, I'd like for Apple to be smart [for a change!], lose a little money on these first ones and make it up as component prices go down.

      But I guess we'll all find out tomorrow.

      TSG

  6. Re:Hang on... by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You misunderstand ^^

    The original 5gb iPod was sold at the same price as the standalone 5gb Toshiba drive... but Apple undoubtedly got tremendous profit due to buying the drive in bulk. Perhaps the same case here: $70 in lots of 100,000, but I am willing to bet Apple can procure and easily sell a million of these. If they can get them at $50 each, and then bundle $50 of electronics, and then sell it for $199, they are making huge markup, no?

    --

    GPL Deconstructed
  7. Write speed... by OneFix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Umh, don't underestimate the issue of write speed...

    I may be able to put a 30 minute album on 30MB of space, but if it takes 10 minutes to copy it to the drive, I'm gonna get seriously pissed after about 2 minutes...

    Then again, I'm still waiting till the whole battery problem is resolved to my satisfaction...

  8. back of the envelope by dutky · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The iPod is basically 5 parts: HD, PCB, LCD, case and battery. If I had to build the PCB from commodity parts (bought from someplace like Digi-Key) I could probably do it for about $50. The case would cost another $20 (in quantity 1000). An appropriate LCD from EarthLCD can be had for about $30 as well. I don't know what the prismatic LiION cell is wholesale, but I'll throw in another $30 for good measure. If we assume that I could get the HD for the 100,000 count price, the whole thing comes to ~$200.

    We can safely assume that Apple can bring some pressure to bear for better pricing on all of the above parts. Given this analysis, I'd guess that the entry price for the mini-iPod will be $149 and Apple knows something we don't about how to keep costs down (or they're willing to take a much lower profit maragin to build market share: not a bad plan if you expect mini-iPod buyers to graduate to higher maragin products in a year or so).

  9. Re:BOM Cost... by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Could Apple be considering selling a 2 GB model at a loss under hopes that users will max it out, and then trade it in for a larger model?

  10. Re:The "Forbidden" screenshot links by bubkus_jones · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How many people would buy it if they could only play AAC? Any mp3 files they already have would a) not be playable on the iPod jr. b) have to be redownloaded/bought in AAC format or c) converted to AAC (with whatever additional loss in quality there may be).

    There's no way I'd buy one if I couldn't use my mp3 collection with it.

    Also, what about people who don't know the difference between the various formats, and when they try to play their trusty mp3 collection, they find it not working. How many calls/emails will Apple receve from this?

  11. It's gotta be $99 or nothing by __aailob1448 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A lot of people are doing the math and coming up with figures between $130-$200 as a price consistent with Apple's pricing philosophy. For those unfamiliar with said philosophy, it goes something like this:

    Final price = manufacturing costs + marketing costs + healthy margin + some more healthy margin + annual GDP of Canada (which isn't much, I'll give you that)

    I know I'm not buying an mp3 player that costs over a hundred bucks. Most people won't either.

    Now if the rumors are true and apple is indeed planning to release a 2Gb mini-Ipod, They should cut on margins and go for a $99 markup. Sales would be huge and would certainly increase the Itunes userbase exponentially. This would allow them to be in a great position to renegociate their contracts with the Big five of the recording industry and profit from it. In /. speak, it goes like this:

    1-sell miniIpod for $99
    2-Increase Itunes userbase and song sales
    3-renegociate contract with record labels
    4-profit!

    Not to mention that a significant amount of Ipod users switch to Macs. More long-term durable profit right there.

    Unfortunately, corporations tend to favor next quarter profits to the detriment of the long-term. So I'm not holding my breath on this one.