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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..."

17 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. Other uses by pvt_medic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While this may allow for an iPod that I can finally be able to afford. I am more interested in the implicationgs for other handheld devices like palm pilot. This is just another step towards having fully functioning PC in a handheld device.

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  2. BOM Cost... by jasno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    $70/100k? So maybe apple buys 500k and gets it for $55.. Add in the electronics and case tooling... Probably costs apple $90 to make. That'd put the cost around $150-$180, unless they want to sell it at cost, but then its still pushing $125.

    Just my 2 cents...

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    1. Re:BOM Cost... by laird · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "70/100k? So maybe apple buys 500k and gets it for $55.. Add in the electronics and case tooling... Probably costs apple $90 to make. That'd put the cost around $150-$180, unless they want to sell it at cost, but then its still pushing $125."

      I think that even at $199 a 2 GB iPod could really excite people. $150 would be pretty amazing, but then Apple's margins would be pretty low (relative to the current iPods) so it'd have to be a volume play.

      Perhaps Apple could bundle pre-paid music from iTMS, to make the effective price $100? For example, $199 bundled with $100 of music is kinda like a $100 iPod. Music companies do discounted promotional bundles all the time, so this wouldn't be far fetched. And for bundling with an iPod, it could be pre-loaded on the hard drive, or pre-paid (gift certificate) to download from iTMS, so there would be no physical costs, just licensing costs. Or perhaps each iPod comes with $100 of sode (which gives iTunes away)? :-)

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    2. Re:BOM Cost... by r0b0t+b0y · · Score: 3, Interesting

      this is very unlikely as, it has been reported widely in the past, apple makes VERY little in pure profit on sales of songs - on the order of a penny or two a track. i believe steve has even been quoted as saying that they expect to make all their profit from this foray into the music biz with the iPod (with which they have HUGE margins). so, your analogy is somewhat correct, only reversed. i agree with the original parent .. if the iPod turns out to retail at $99, it's a volume play, pure and simple. but i doubt it'll happen b/c apple will try to maximize profit .. esp. since this is a new product. maybe in a coupla months, the price will drop if the volume isn't as high as expected.

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  3. Re:Flash Memory by ceejayoz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Got anywhere I can buy 2 gigabyte flash memory cards for $100 or so?

    As for the dropping problem, everyone I know who has an iPod has dropped it at least once, no problems.

  4. Re:$70 for a 2 gig drive! by msgmonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well even seek times of even 100ms would be more than acceptable for playing back compressed audio. Transfer rate would n't need to be high either, 0.5mb/sec would mean most songs could be cached to memory in a few seconds.

  5. Fine, here is an ON topic post... by strider69666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Being as the drive is a micro drive, and the abuse it will undoubtedly recieve, are these drives up to the task? How well are they stress tested to make sure that they would be suitable for a mini-Ipod? I have heard complaints about regular Ipod drives not lasting as long as expected, so I wonder if a micro drive would fail even faster.

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    1. Re:Fine, here is an ON topic post... by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Being a "micro" drive actually makes the things less fragile, not more.

      The acceleration needed to bend a head down to impact with a platter increases with the shrinking length of the arm the head is mounted on, and increases again with the decrease in mass of the head and arm. It's a simple matter of scale. So a smaller mechanisim could be much more resistant to crashing.

      Anyway, I've never heard any actual complaints about iPod drives, just speculation by pundits that *maybe* there *might* eventually be problems with some constantly abused units. And I have heard plenty of stories of people bouncing them off the concrete multiple times with no ill effects. Therefore I question your sources.

      --
      "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
  6. Good Lord, that's smalls by hackshack · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If ya'll check the PDF, the drive itself is only about 40x40mm square. This is about the size of the current iPod's LCD screen. Perhaps Apple will omit the LCD or replace it with a single- or dual-line display to save money... one would think navigation would be impaired as a result, but perhaps they've got something up their sleeves. They've gotta save money somewhere, in any case... perhaps they've figured out a way to reduce the number of on board ICs from 4-5 to 1-2. Maybe it'll be essentially a USB "thumb drive" with no cable to speak of... it'll save on FireWire controllers at least.

    Interesting how, despite the poster's comparison to old-tyme MFM drives, the Cornice is apparently equipped with a "true IDE" interface. Dunno what level ATA that is, but parts is parts to a certain extent, and it looks like a fairly simple drop-in solution. The iPod, despite being incredibly compact, uses no custom ICs- everything's all off the shelf- this was done on purpose and the Cornice SE jives perfectly with this design methodology.

    Maybe this'll be the next Gameboy, from a pop culture standpoint.

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  7. This is the beginning of something good... by overbyj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One of the biggest gripes about the iPod has been the price (let's not get into the battery issue here). These mini-iPods will fill a void in the Apple lineup and compete with the lower end MP3 players. However, if they get these mini-iPods at a price point of around $120-150, they will crush the competition because of what the competition is selling pricewise.

    I was in Best Buy recently and saw a Rio MP3 player with a whopping 128 MB for $109. If Apple gets a mini-iPod for about that price, who in their right mind will buy a Rio player for that price. The only potential drawback to the iPod is that it can't WMA files served up by MusicMatch, Napster and other crappy music services. Granted, if you are buying any iPod, you are probably not wasting your time with those sites anyway.

    Here's to hoping to something good tomorrow at MacWorld. Please Steve, I want an affordable iPod!

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  8. Re:WHy not by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The new iPod that this drive is supposedly intended for will be a much smaller player.

    Even if it wasn't, the selling point is that this is going to be a cheap, load-it-up-and-forget-it, player. Right now the choices are between cheap, constantly-reupdate-it-with-different-music, type players where you can barely fit more than two or three hours of music on them at a time, and expensive maintain-irregularly players like the iPod.

    This adds something new. And it'll be small and cheap too, if the rumours are to be believed.

    Oh, and First Post trolls: I meant to write "fairly nuts", meaning "quite crazy" or "slightly insane". Sorry about that. I note I also put spaced hard-drive inconsistantly too. So shoot me ;)

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  9. A couple ways this could happen... by YllabianBitPipe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After skimming all the Mac Rumour sites, here's some possibilities: iPod junior comes out with this micro drive but USB instead of Firewire. Or, iPod junior debuts with upgradeable flash storage. They give you a piddly amount to start, and keep it under 100 bucks that way. My money is on an iPod jr using the microdrive, USB, and priced at 149.

  10. Cornice???? by Andy_R · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've never heard of Cornice before (am I woefully uninformed? maybe!)

    I suspect one of the bigger names will turn out to be Apple's supplier. Apple have been at the cutting edge ofindustrial design for years now, so I would also expect the drive for a mini ipod would not be a off-the-shelf product at all, instead it would be very tightly integrated into the mini ipod.

    As for $70 per 100,000, I think that's a sign this isn't the drive too. Apple would be putting in an order for a few million a year. If Cornice was the supplier for a product as hot as mini ipod, would they really have 100,000 spare to offer to anyone else, and would Apple let them pitch it so boldly at other mp3 player builders the day before (supposed) launch?

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  11. Re:Why would you? by X_Caffeine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had access to a roommate's 20gig iPod all last summer, and hated it. Too big, too clunky.

    The only place I really wanted to use it was at the gym, and the device (in a belt clip) kept tugging my shorts down. And all I want is maybe a dozen albums to pick from while I'm lifting weights, walking to and from home.

    (and before you mention solid state devices -- I want something that works with iTunes!)

    A mini-iPod would be perfect for me. Unfortunately, I don't believe the rumors at all.

    --
    // I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
  12. Yes, but.... by djupedal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That was then....this is now.

    All it takes is a breakthrough in compression to mean you don't have to spend so much time and energy handling the read/decode/buffer/play routine.

    Cut at least two of those dramactically and you've compensated for an otherwise/relatively slow drive.

    Apple has been very busy with QuickTime, iTunes and AAC lately - note that current purchased music has a profile of 'Low Complexity'.

    I betting they have an advanced codec that allows them to overcome traditional restrictions that may baffle others that have attempted and given up on the same combination of mechanicals and electronics.

  13. Re:More likely to be $199.... by idiot900 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    $200 for 2GB seems an awful lot to the average consumer, when one can pay $300 for five times the space in the 10GB version. Pricing it like this makes the 2GB player look like a terrible value. Even as a student with little disposable income, I would much rather pay the extra $100 than sacrifice 8GB.

    That is, unless there is some amazing killer feature to it. Obscenely long battery life? Really small? It would have to be amazingly sexy for it to be worth $200 when the premium for the next higher model is so little given the much greater capacity.

    Also, the quoted price is $70 each for the media in 100k quantities. Perhaps this price is artificially raised for Apple's competitors, by agreement with Apple, in order to discourage them from buying the same media from Cornice and making knockoff players. And maybe Cornice does not have the capacity to make too many more of these things above and beyond Apple's order, and jacking up the price for everyone but Apple saves them from losing face by denying orders. Cornice loses nothing, Apple gets to make their player, and competitors are left high and dry.

    I've said this before - if come tomorrow these "microPods" actually exist and are selling for $100, I will buy one immediately. Let's hope it'll be easy to coerce Linux to talk to it :)

  14. Re:$70 for a 2 gig drive! by wrmrxxx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The marketing brochure at the Cornice web site lists the transfer rate for the new drive as 4.5 MB/s (that's megabytes, not megabits), or more than 280 times the rate required for 128Kb/s audio playback. You need it to be much faster than the audio playback rate so that you can run the drive only for some of the time and cache the data in memory, therefore using less power.

    It also lists the average power consumption for typical audio playback as only 4mW. That assumes that you have 32MB of memory available as a cache and that the audio is 64Kb/sec.

    Interestingly, the brochure also claims that the electrical interface to the device uses true IDE mode. Using a well established standard like this means that just about anyone could interface with it - I would love to get my hands on one of these to put into my own MP3 player, but it doesn't look like this company is particular interested in selling single drives to people like me. Using a standard IDE interface also means that existing hardware and software drivers can be re-used: for example there are USB2 to IDE bridge chips that could (in theory) connected directly to this drive for a portable MP3 player, and there is also plenty of GPL'ed code for interfacing to IDE devices.