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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..."

14 of 434 comments (clear)

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

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

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

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

    Just my 2 cents...

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

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

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

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

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    2. Re:BOM Cost... by 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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

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  5. 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

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

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

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

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  7. 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.

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  8. 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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  9. 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.

  10. 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. :-)

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  11. 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.

  12. 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.