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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..."
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.
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.
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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)
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.
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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.
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Ever heard of a pressurized cabin?
--- I do not moderate.
very favorably?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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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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]
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.
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!
"how the hard drive data density trend compares with Moore's Law"
:-)
:-)
I remember working this out a few years back -- the hard drive industry was cranking along at about Moore's Law, then IBM started really pushing, and blew past the competition, averaging 75% improvement annually. And for the last few years, the standard hard drive size in PC's has doubled annually. A few data points from digging on the web:
Summer 1999: IBM 340 MB Microdrive, 5 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2000: IBM 1 GB Microdrive, 15.2 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2002: IBM demonstrates 1 trillion bits per square inch. This is an 'in the lab' technology, so it'll be a few years until it's a product, but it makes pretty clear that there's some room to grow.
Years ago I made a graph of all of the computer's I'd owned, with CPU speed, display resolution, modem bandwidth, primary storage, and removable storage. It was amazing how they all improved dramatically, though in relative terms displays have improved slowly -- in the same time that a 1.77 MHz 8-bit TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM and a cassette tape drive turned into a 733 MHz 32-bit PowerMac G4 with 1.5 GB or RAM, a DVD-R drive (i.e. improvements on the order of a factor of 1 million) the display went from 64x16 character text display (or 128x48 b/w pixels) to a 1600x1024 pixel, 24 bit deep color display, which is only 6,400x as much data on the screen, and the 300 bps modem became a 1 mbps cable modem, which is only 3,333x as fast. Pathetic compared to improvements in storage, RAM and CPU.
Man, I have to buy a new computer. Same display and cable modem, but a 2 CPU 2 GHz G5 would make those curves so much prettier.
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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.
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
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
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?
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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.
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.
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
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/