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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..."
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
$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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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.
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.
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?
"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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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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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.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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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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.
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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.
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]
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 ;)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
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
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
"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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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...
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
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?
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.
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.
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...