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Mini-iPod Mystery Drive Unveiled?
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..."
how the hard drive data density trend compares with Moore's Law.
I can ditch my cheap-ass knock-off and get the real thing!
"Extremism in defense of liberty is more fun."
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.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Jesus, that gave me a flashback! A bad one too. For a second there, I was reliving shelling out $200 for 64Mb of PC66 RAM. But seriously, what kind of seek time does a micro 2Gb drive have with no buffer and virtually no electronics? And how many platters is it/could it use?
Dude. Dude. Dude. Dude. DUDE!!!! Duuuudde. Yeah, I guess you have a point there. (Baseketball)
$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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If you're going for storage, why not get the full size iPod? If you are going for small, why not get a smaller player, there are much smaller ones out there that hold a considerable amount, albeit not as much as iPod Jr.
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
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.
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.
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.
I thought it was going to be a Toshiba drive that will be announced at CES. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,39020351,391184 79,00.htm
MacRumors is also confident that a new product called GarageBand will be released tomorrow. Probably a consumer audio application
Garage Band
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?
just think, string together half a dozen of these w/ a controller, and you'd have... iPod RAID!
Never, ever, have a song skip.
"Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible" -Jacob Bronowski
http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m226.htm
The cheapest 2GB I see there is $175.
"Why don't they just use flash memory? It's almost as small and has no moving parts."
:-)
Price and capacity. You can get a 2 GB hard drive for $70, and the largest, cheapest flash RAM card I can find is 1 GB for $290 (retail), making 2 GB at least that much wholesale, and probably more. It's very hard to profitably sell an MP3 player for $100 that contains $300 of flash storage.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Although Moore's law has since the 1970s been defined in terms of the number of transistors on a chip, it is common to refer to Moore's law in reference to the rapid continuing advance in computing power per dollar cost.
A similar progression has held for hard disk storage available per dollar cost - in fact, the rate of progression in disk storage over the past 10 years or so has actually been faster than for semiconductors--although, largely because of production cost issues, hard drive performance increases have lagged significantly.
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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.
Dude. Dude. Dude. Dude. DUDE!!!! Duuuudde. Yeah, I guess you have a point there. (Baseketball)
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.
If the harddrive costs $70, I don't think a $30 markup is unreasonable, considering the iPod (and the low profit - if any at all - iTunes) is really just a tool to increase Apple's customer base. They need to make money somehow.
So how do the books balance out? I would expect if Apple is so interested in pushing the iPods [as evidenced by the creation of iTunes], they'd want to get a nice profit from each unit sold.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Just means you use the memory connected to your microcontroller instead of having memory in the drive. The music buffer in the iPOD is n't the one in the drive, it's in main memory too. They're just lowering the cost by utilizing the processing power in the host cpu instead of including it the drive.
I realize that both are electronic devices, but one is a measure of speed, one is a measure of density/capacity. It would be like comparing kph and kg.
I hate sigs.
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.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Ever heard of a pressurized cabin?
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You must be new here.
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!
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
then why, in the marketing PDF, do they only mention WMA, and not AAC?
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
Well, that rather depends on whether the inside of the airplane is pressurized to the same pressure as the atmosphere nearer ground. If you're planning to use this thing in a Lancaster Bomber or a Flying Fortress, my advice would be don't. For a conventional, modern, passenger plane, I don't think you have anything to worry about...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Fully fledged iPod for half the price! - Suckers!
Hmm...something seems not quite right...
I realize that both are electronic devices, but one is a measure of speed, one is a measure of density/capacity. It would be like comparing kph and kg.
Which one is the measure of speed? HD capacity is a measure of capacity (duh). Moore's law was a measure of capacity (transistors per IC to be precise).
[accent="outrageous french"] No thanks, I've already got one, you see. It's very ni-suh.[/accent]
If I recall correctly..
I thought iTunes was a break even venture at best?
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.
he may be new, but nonetheless he is right.
His post is not Offtopic. Somebody can answer him : this is the price of miniaturization. And that's it. But get prepared to pay for more than that to get that little cute white thing in your pocket.
Apple moderating zealotry is one of the most unbearable thing down there. Shame on you ! ;0
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jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
Ya think so? I'm not so sure...
As long as we're conjecturing here, I think I'll add one of my own. I'm betting that if this is indeed gonna hit the low end of the market (if it's $199 I don't consider it low end) it's gonna be powered by a AAA or a AA. I think it'd help the device's market penetration to be powered by something the masses trust. Granted, a Li-Ion solution would probably be the best, but as far as power is concerned, quite a few people in the target demo for this device are probably gonna be wary of something powered by a battery they can't touch. Just a thought...
Nonsense! Just make it up in volume!
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
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?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
And a cheap knock off of the IBM/Hitachi drive at that.
2 GB Solid State cards go for close to $500!
True, that. About 3 months ago, I dropped my iPod about 3 feet to a hard tile floor, dented the back significantly, and no problems yet. I guess it wasn't seeking at the time - I suppose that would have been a problem.
seriouslyexcited.net
Does anybody have any figures on how price and quantity interrelate once you start getting to these sizes - or is there sufficiently few of these contracts and sufficiently many other complicating factors that the price trends are difficult to discern?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
it appears as if IMB and its microdrive have some competition. And if this thing is as rugged as it claims to be, the future looks good, real good.
I want 2D games back.
my IBAN account number...
...I did it again. :)
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Well then you better start buying cause you can replace the battery yourself for US $50
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.
iBook
TiBook
iMac
eMac
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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...
Did anyone post "the cabin is pressurized" yet?
Because if they didn't, could I get some karma points for mentioning it?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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).
I prefer datasheets to press releases for hardware.
a rketing Brochure_2.0.pdf
This gives a little bit more info:
http://www.corniceco.com/download/CorniceM
Cornice says their drives can withstand a 1 meter drop onto concrete. IIRC that's about a yard.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
People are talking about how the Ipod is going to be $150 or $199 because of this drive. The new mini-Ipod has to have at least a $99 version to hit the target market. If your going to spend $199 you might as well get 5x the capacity for just $100 more. Whether Apple can do it who knows, but I will certainly be disappointed if they can't get one out there for $99.
the iPod a cell phone as well.
Would be a lot easier then adding a MP3 player to a cell phone.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Prices will always drop over time from a products inception -- unless of course you're buying Windows. :) $200 for 64Mb of RAM gave you a bad flashback? I was having the same flashback, but I can remember spending $1,000 US dollars for my first 16M SIMM (with parity of course as it was running some Un*x :).
:)
I've forgotten more than those chips could hold from drinking beer -- and probably spent more doing that too...
Yeah, but if the plane explodes in midair, with the change in pressure hurt the iPod? ;)
Could be he does HALO or HAHO jumps, in which case the plane may not be pressurized.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"this is the equivalent of a 1980's RLL or MFM drive."
I still use an MFM drive you insensitive clod!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
this is the equivalent of a 1980's RLL or MFM drive.
You DO know what MFM stood for? I'll give you a hint: it has to do with the type of technology used in making it work.
Answer: Muther-Fucking Magic. MFM.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I don't get it. Explaination anyone?
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?
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
man, that's a lot of stink!
2000 feet doesn't seem so high.
Think about it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Looks to me like this would be a really low-margin product for them. As far as I can recall, Apple has always valued high profit margins over sales volume.
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:
/. speak, it goes 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
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.
If they sold them at unit cost + $10(and that was below $100) they would be great for saturating the market with devices that played Apple-style protected AACs.
Disposable income-types would still be getting iPods(and miniPods) and when they introduce support for burning direct to a CD-R over firewire...)
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Lisa: Have fun seeing Bob Sagat!
Wiggum: But these tickets are for Bob Seger... Ahhhh, crap.
unf.
This is what is on Mac Rumors site now. Gives the size, and the transfer rate...looks like we have a winner.
Update: This marketing brochure (PDF) offers a photo of the new device as well as some specs. The new drive is "magnetic media" based, 42.8mm x 36.4mm x 5mm, has a 4.5Mbytes/sec average transfer rate, and weighs 14.5 grams.
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Damn--I need 150,000.
Despite what the other poster said, I agree with the underlying premise that it's $99 or nothing. A $150 player is neat, but is not the kind of amazing announcement Apple likes to make.
You don't even need the whole contract leverage angle. All the profit you need comes from upgrade sales where people see how much they love having a real iPod, then decide they need a bigger one. Plus as you say it means more traffic and thus more word of mouth about the Apple store.
Furthermore, a $99 iPod goes so well with the Pepsi promotion that it makes your head spin (if you're in marketing, anyway).
Anything above $99 is too close to the current iPod and too far from utter domination of the MP3 player market. And by releasing it soon there's still time to catch a wave of people returning other devices given at Christmas to buy an iPod instead...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Beats me. Maybe it's because people think the mini iPod will be cheaper than $220.
So New Yorkers should buy that new iPod on credit...
Safeguard $3k worth of music
Uh, no.
My iPod
1) travels around with me and is more likely to get dropped than my PC or CDs
2) has already crashed once (3 months old) requiring a "force disc mode." That's documented at Apple, not in the manual & I actually found out about it in the iPodlounge FAQ. This recovery mode requires a "restore" which reformats the disc.
My music is safely on a bunch of discs sitting in a changer. Now that I have an iPod, the only reason discs leave the changer is to be ripped (I'm only 1/2 done).
I don't want to lose the work I did ripping & encoding, so I'll burn 4 or 5 DVDs at some point.
The only way an iPod could save my music is if my house burned down while I was out and it didn't crash before I had a chance to back it up. I plan to store my DVD-R backupss at work for a better version of the same idea.
The real question is... Has anyone gotten Linux to boot on it yet?
Or better yet, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
this space left blank
A better question is: What happens to my ipod when I climb Mt. Everest?
On the second day of his everest expedition, Bob's iPod was not responding well to the cold. "Damn it, I just bought this thing", thought Bob, as he desperately tried to diagnose the trouble. The thick heavy mittens he wore weren't helping, and suddenly, his precious iPod slipped out of his hand, and half buried itself in the fresh powder.
"My precious!, Where is my precious?" thought Bob. He tore off his sun goggles, in a desperate attempt to locate the shiny white mp3 player. It was perhaps the worst decision of his ill fated decision since he had dozed off during one of the orienteering lectures, lulled by the gentle rhythms of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
The snow was bright, so very bright. And his ipod so very small. Up ahead, the rest of his party had moved on. But Bob felt sure he would be soon be able to rock out with a little Donavan. Finely, he spotted something. Was it his player? No, it was merely some loose snow concealing a crevasse...
1) build os x for intel
2) build ipod, ilife, and other devices such as fantastic set-top devices, etc... for computer users
as #2 grows, the number of Apple HW owners increases and its user base increases dramatically. Even iPod and iTMS accomplishes this.
Eventually, apple will release #1 .. os x for Intel. This will hurt, badly, their own cpu hardware sales for desktop PCs. But instead of killing the close market like before, Apple will welcome it because their revenue will be coming from their host of excellent iLife, iPod, and other iDevice hardware, as well as their OS updates.
Steve realizes that tying his revenue to IBM/Moto hardware bundled to his OS ultimately is a losing venture and the best way to go is to build the 'apple lifestyle' .. and that's, I bet, the long-term plan at Apple.
I am not an insider, but I'd lay even money that OS X is running well on Intel internally and Apple is betting on switching its revenue stream to sources other than its own pc hardware sales. This will free it from the 80s-90s computer co. model and into the realm of the future.
Or maybe I'm totally off base.
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
Have they ever done that? Apple tries to add value to justify higher prices rather than remove value & sell cheap.
My prediction is that the mini iPod will be flash based for 3 1/2 reasons:
1) cost
2) vibration/shock resistance
3) size
4) and maybe power consumption (dunno 'bout the CSE's mW)
I'm guessing it'll be $129 not $99, but I think the suggestion made elsewhere that this might include some ITMS songs is right-on. They eventually put out a $99 model with the flash of the $129 & do a new $129 with double the old one.
You can jog with an iPod if you hold it in your hand, but you're pushing its ability to keep the buffer from emptying. Snowboarding, mountain biking, &c will be harder. I think they'll make it really small and emphasize the "active" aspect.
How is that any better than everyone else's flash based player? (that is Cornice would be a bigger differentiator) Good question, mmmm... 1) rides the coattails of its big brother 2) is incredibly small 3) iTunes & the store 4) some wildcard like Bluetooth.
No, you hate Mac users 'cause they can afford the cool stuff you can't!
iTMS was pushing iPods.
Now if these relatively cheap mini-iPods arrive, they can't be pushing iPods. They'd have to be pushing the iTMS.
So what then does the iTMS now push? Or iPods? iTunes? iMacs? iMconfused?
The only "reasonable" explaination I'd see for a killer price-iPod is to coup the standards war - wmv out, aac in as the de facto standard of digital music.
I find it much more likely that it'll have the normal Apple mark-up. In other words, quite expensive compared to players of similar specs. The primary "sellers" are the iPod brand, interface and iTMS, not price.
Of course, I could be horribly wrong. But I don't see how it'd be in Apples interest to do anything drastic that could hurt their iPod cashcow.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wouldn't be supprised if they did try to get it as low as $99 - this would go hand-in-hand with their 99cent songs making for a nice marketing campaign...
If iTunes is making the continual revenue then it will be possible sell iPods at a loss so they can increase the market share and sell more of their 99 cent songs. It is similar to Sony selling the Playstation for more than it costs to build because the average customer will buy at least 6 games for the life of the console which gives Sony a profit from their game licensing. I hope that works for Apple as well. I do not need 40 gigs for music. I just need about 4 gigs and a player that can play my 99 cent songs from iTunes and the mp3 files that I have ripped from my existing CD collection.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
Apple won't have to pay the credit card company as much because the user won't be making one hundred 99 cent credit card purchases. (I know Apple groups music purchased in a small time frame into one purchase, so it won't always be one hundred 99cent charges... but all at once is still less)
2) The standards war. You got it. Why spend $200 on a 128 mb flash player, when you can get an iPod jr., 2 gigs of storage, for $100? (or maybe $150). Apple cinches up the MP3 player market, but good -- and wins the standards war in the process. 3) A cheap but well designed product would do wonders for Apple's brand name. iPods and iTunes sell Macs to previous Windows users, but not many people have iPods, because they are expensive. Drop the price, and iPods become more prevalent -- and more people look into buying Macs.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
wow, so many in the slashdot community are but a bunch of redneck hill billies bible belt catholic haters... How can someone who probably fucks his own sister, mother, daughter, milk providing goat accuse of paedophilia to Catholics and homosexuals alike? I don't agree to what the Catholic Church preaches, but how can you accuse a whole organization of such nasty crimes because of a few rotten apples? If we follow that line of thought then all American policemen are black-haters, immigrant-bashing hoddlums...
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
Here in the Netherlands *every* consumer product is tested against that (1 meter drop on concrete). A consumer product is allowed to be 'damaged' (e.g. scratched), but not to loose its functionality or form a danger to the consumer.
I think you are suggesting the traditional razor blade model. Sell the iPod cheap, and make lots of money on the music.
But people are used to getting their razor blades (music) for free, so apple has to make money on the iPod. It looks a lot more like the iTunes store is a tool to keep apple from getting sued by the labels.
So I expect the new iPod will carry a high price and apple will continue to be a hardware company.
What about a 1gig @ $99 and a 2gig @$149?
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
I live in Australia and have an ipod I keep in my backpack. After walking around outside on a summer day, the buttons don't function for about 5 minutes. Too hot :)
this is the beginning of a new era.
eventually we will have disposable computing devices.
you see already products like migo, Xkey for corporate mail and groupware, backup buddy etal
there is a good article on the register describing this trend
Designing cheap miniature hard drives is very expensive, time consuming, technically challenging, and would add absolutely zero value to Apple's product offerings. Apple solidly abandoned the custom components philosophy six or seven years ago, and was headed that direction long before then. All Apple's recent designs rely very heavily on off-the-shelf components, and there's no disadvantage to doing so; as long as it meets the project's design parameters, the designer of the hard drive, etc., just has nothing to do with the overall industrial design (BTW, other manufacturers could learn from that example...). If there's no device that meets the design parameters, that's a strong message to the company that it is too far in front of the technology asking for trouble. Plus, if something is standards compliant, any manufacturer's device could be substituted when a better deal is available elsewhere. So if a mini-iPod is announced, Apple will be using an off-the-shelf miniature ATA hard drive.
Again, looking back at recent history of Apple, I can't think of any exceptions to this design philosophy.
Forget a hundred bucks. Sell me this for 50:
A little thingamabob that plays MP3s and you put your compactflash or smartmedia or what have you card into it. Esp. now that I can get a 1GB cf.
Just gimme a little mp3 player and a aaa battery. That's all I want. It doesn't need built in storage.
I'll pay seventy, tops. And that really seems like too much.
How many chips do you need? Something to access the memory. Something to decode a MP3. A little amplifier. A little power supply, and a small lcd readout and a few buttons, one of which must be shuffle.
I can't get all that for fifty bucks? I would think Sony would be churning these bad boys out day and night.
This is pure speculation, I have no inside knowledge whatsoever, but what if Cornice needed some venture capital, and approached Apple with a deal like this....
"How about you kick in $x million now to help us get our production line set up, and in return we'll agree sell you x million drives at a steeply discounted price."
Cornice wins - they get their product to market, with guaranteed sales
Apple wins - they get to sell their iPods at a price that none of their competitors can beat, thus enhancing their dominance of the market.
The consumer wins - they get an iPod cheaper than would be possible otherwise.
Rio/Dell/etc lose.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Dang,
I hate cliffhangers, now I have to return for tomorrow's episode...
"/Dread"
...kaleidoscopes, mathmos lava lamps and all the rest of they eyecandy...
I think you missed the word "off". Although maybe getting Pissed doesn't mean drunk in the states but in NZ, Aussie and the UK to get pissed would mean to get very drunk not that there is anything wrong with that on the odd occasion.
I even kicked it once (an accident, I swear!) and sent it sailing across the room onto a hardwood floor. No damage whatsoever (it's fitted with an iskin, so it wasn't even dented or scratched).
Of course, other stuff is going on in compressed audio as well -- in fact, most of it is based around psychoacoustic models, to let us know what data we can't actually hear and can therefore throw out. But, while those models can always be improved, it seems pretty clear that we've pared most of the audio waveform down. There are improvements to be made, sure, but they probably will serve mostly to improve fidelity, not compression size.
Maybe I'm just being myopic, but I don't see any more compression breakthroughs coming... at least until someone develops quantum storage (which I won't even pretend to understand).
I know many PC users who get openly hostile when they find out that I prefer to use Macs. They obsess about the one-button thing, deride the fruity colors, and constantly remind me that MegaSuperUltraFrag isn't out on the Mac yet.
Yet, a lot of these same people have downloaded iTMS, have realized how easy it is to use compared to other legal or illegal services, and grudgingly admit that Apple's on to something. They like how the iPod looks, but don't want to spend so much on it. And since the iPod is the only player that iTunes for Windows works with, this means that they're still using some other software to load their MP3's onto their Rio's.
Now, if they can buy a player that has many times the capacity of the flash players out on the market right now, but priced between $120 and $150, you'll see a lot more 128MB Flash-based players on eBay after all these people snap them up, and more people will be using iTunes (and quicktime!) on a regular basis. (They'll still make fun of the mouse, though.)
In short, a mini-iPod is targeted squarely at Windows users who usually dismiss Apple hardware as overpriced. If all these people rush out and buy mini-iPods, Apple will simply own the portable player market, and get a back-door to installing Quicktime on every windows machine that has iTunes. Apple can afford to reduce their margins to get this type of market share.
Can you get portable MP3-DVD players yet? You know, just like the MP3-CD clamshell ones, barely bigger than a CD, but that can play DVD-Rs?
If so, that'd rock far more than this iPod stuff. 4.7GB on a single DVD-R, you could carry a pretty great portable collection on a single DVD. And most people could fit their whole CD library onto just three or four in total.
Sure, it'd be quite a bit bigger than an iPod, but not necessarily any heavier, and my regular CD player fits in my pocket, doesn't skip. I'd be happy to pay $100 for a portable 4.7GB MP3-DVD player, compared to $300 for a 10GB iPod. (Considering you can get MP3-CD players for less than $50 now, $100 for a DVD version doesn't sound unreasonable)
The benefits of this? You can swap discs around quickly, you can (maybe) use DVD-RWs, you can use rechargable batteries, and you can get WAY MORE than 8 crappy hours (like the iPod gets).
Apple will announce a mini-iPod. It will be crippled compared to standard iPods in that it will only play .AAC files.
R-A-I-D should read B-E-O-W-U-L-F.
The word cluster also goes somewhere there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's a new Rio Nitrus coming out offering 4 GB capacity for $249, according to the above press release. I'd imagine it uses the same technology as Apple's offering and will probably end up at the same street price.
It looks like a nice alternative for fans of non-Apple music stores and USB 2.0.
aww come on, mod parent funny
personally i dropped mine about half a dozen times over the course of it's short life. though what killed it was the firewire port breaking off. the hard drive and battery still functioned fine so i sold it for parts on ebay. i'm gonna buy a new one after they announce whatever it is they're announcing...
>>bsgenerator stands for BULLSHIT generator?
yep.
>>You don't know nothing about The Netherlands.
I live there. Try to introduce a consumer-electronic product on the local market here and see what happens. Do you know your product even has to withstand 'moderate non-standard' a.k.a. (ab)use of a customer ?
Jobs say: We use iTunes to push iPods out the door>
You say: Use miniPods to push iTunes songs out the server
That ain't logical
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
So I just saw notes from the apple keynote b/c I was interested in this whole ipod jr. rumor.
Turns out that the device isn't 2 gig but 4, and I guess that's nice. But it doesn't come in at the speculated $99 or even the more middle-of-the-road $149 or $199.
The device (Ipod mini) is supposed to sell for $249. Note that you can save a FULL $50 by buying this device over the bottom of the line IPOD which is $299 (now with 15 gig hdd instead of 10).
Jobs says that the mini is aimed at the $100 - $200 flash device market, but at $249 it's not really as if you can compare it to the flash devices in Best Buy selling for $125.
The IPOD mini fleshes out the transition space between flash and hdd devices (along with the rio 1.5 gig unit - $190), but I'm afraid it doesn't impact my own search for a cheap + expandable unit. The IPOD MINI doesn't even manage to force prices down on other units.
And so I continue on my search for a device that I can expand later to >256 meg with price $100.
poor / cheap geeks != apple's target market
A drive that cheap might do well inside of the newer 5 megapixel SLRs. It would definitely compete against flash memory at that price.
http://www.apple.com/ipodmini/ Something official, I presume
I'm estimating my cost here to be:
$20 for CD player
$5 for cd case (also at Worst Buy)
$.36 per CD-R x 24 = 8.64
= About $35 (with tax, etc) for just under 17 GB of portable music
$99 be damned. If you're a true cheapskate, this will work just fine.
Just for drill, I went through their emarket as if i were to buy a iPod mini and came up with this interesting tactic.
You can personalize each iPod with a message, making your own statement on it.
BUT!
Here's the kicker, once your graffiti has been etched onto the back of it, it's non-returnable.
So much for their vaunted effort to cover their collective asses when the original iPod's batteries started to croak.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
its all an evil apple scheme. before, i was pretty skeptical about buying an ipod, but now i look at the high price of this one and think "11GBs more for $50, hmmmmmm" and now the big ipod looks more attractive to me.
http://ipod.fresh27.net/