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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..."

51 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. 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.

    --
    30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
    Score:5, Troll
  3. 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...

    --

    http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
    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)? :-)

      --
      Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
    2. Re:BOM Cost... by jayhawk88 · · Score: 4, Funny

      More like...

      Jobs: How about you sell us half a million of those drives for $10 each.
      Cornice CEO: Well, that's pretty much below what it costs us to make them, we've got to have at least $50 each for them.
      Jobs: Let me put this another way. How about you sell us half a million of those drive for $10 each, and we'll not buy out your company and fire every manager making over $100k a year?
      Cornice CEO: Uh...OK!

      OK, so Apple isn't exactly Microsoft, but you can't tell me Cornice isn't going to bend over backwards to get their name associated with something that would be this big.

    3. Re:BOM Cost... by Hrunting · · Score: 5, Funny

      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)? :-)

      Geezus, STOP GIVING THEM FSCKING MARKETING IDEAS! I want an iPod for $100! I don't want 100 bucks worth of music. I don't want a stupid gift certificate or licensing or anything. I'm a dirt cheap geek who is thisclose to actually braving the redneck land of Wal-Mart to get a $99 PC that I can muck around with. You telling Apple all these different ways for them to charge me even more for a product I already think is overpriced isn't getting me any closer to my wet dream.

      Really? Why doesn't anybody just say, "If they take a loss on the iPod, they'll sell more at the Music Store. Also, give away 100,000 Junior iPods free to water their mouths!" Now that's a marketing plan I can get on board with.

    4. 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?

    5. 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.

      --


      ----
      i do not use drugs, i AM drugs -- Dali
  4. 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 jaysones · · Score: 4, Funny
      Hmm, I'd rather listen to a hard drive spinning than Bob Seger.

      :D

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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 2nd+Post! · · Score: 4, Informative

      Except it does!

      You can back up your computer
      Boot off it
      Keep track of appointments
      Keep track of phone numbers
      Play Solitaire
      Listen to MP3s
      Safeguard $3k worth of music

      In fact... it's about as useful as a PC running Windows 95!

      I'm joking, but the worth of an iPod is >>> than just an MP3 player. It's a portable firewire powered hard drive that also happens to play MP3s

      --

      GPL Deconstructed
    4. 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. Re:Why would you? by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 3, Informative

      So Kris_J sez:

      "...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. "

      For someone like myself, who doesn't feel the need to carry my whole collection with me at one time, nor brag about it, a 2gig iPod at an affordable price would suit me just fine.

      I swear, the size of one's iPod hard drive is now the "I've got the biggest dick!" of the 21st Century.

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    6. 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.
  8. 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.

  9. 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

    2. 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 :)

  10. Re:Flash Memory by laird · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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!
  11. Wikipedia has the answer by Texas+Rose+on+Lava+L · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Link

    --

    Rank Presidents by th

  12. 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
  13. 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.

    --
    Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
  14. 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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  15. SWEET! by teamhasnoi · · Score: 3, Funny
    I am getting one as soon as they come out and swapping in my IBM XT 10 meg drive!

    Fully fledged iPod for half the price! - Suckers!

    Hmm...something seems not quite right...

  16. Re:$70 for a 2 gig drive! by Seehund · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well even seek times of even 100ms would be more than acceptable for playing back compressed audio.

    That's impressive. I've heard of portable audio players with seek times of up to several minutes.

    I think they're called "Walkman" or something like that.

    Aah, memories... PRESS PLAY ON TAPE.

    --
    Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
  17. Try again by jkabbe · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  18. Fully functioning PC in a handheld device? by Enucite · · Score: 4, Funny

    [accent="outrageous french"] No thanks, I've already got one, you see. It's very ni-suh.[/accent]

  19. 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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  20. 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.

  21. 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
  22. 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?

    --
    A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
    1. Re:Cornice???? by fantastic+max · · Score: 4, Informative
      I've never heard of Cornice before

      and would Apple let them pitch it so boldly at other mp3 player builders the day before (supposed) launch?

      Cornice makes the 1.5 GB drive that is used in the Rio Nitrus/Eigen. So there's already another mp3 player builder that knows about this company.

  23. Re:I wonder.... by laird · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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. :-)

    --
    Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
  24. 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.

  25. 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...

  26. Re:Did anyone else notice? by GoofyBoy · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  27. 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).

  28. where's the data sheet? by Doppler00 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I prefer datasheets to press releases for hardware.

    This gives a little bit more info:
    http://www.corniceco.com/download/CorniceMa rketing Brochure_2.0.pdf

  29. 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?

  30. 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.

  31. 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.

  32. Re:Did anyone else notice? by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...