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60GB iPod Coming?
An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba today announced that it will offer a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch hard drive in the coming months and that Apple has already placed its order. Cindy Lee, deputy manager of Toshiba's hard disk drive division, said the drive will enter mass production during July or August. All three iPod models (15GB, 20GB, and 40GB) use Toshiba drives, while the iPod mini uses a 4GB 1-inch drive from Hitachi. Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000 of the 1.8-inch drives per month to Apple."
I have almost 10 GB of music on my pc. I only listen to about 50 of them on a regualr basis. Does anyone really need 60 GB of music. Yes it can be used for backup purposes. But dedicated backup external hard drives at a higher storage capacity are cheaper than this.
I wonder what kind of breakthrough the mini drive will get in the near future. 4gigs is a decent size for a music player, but what if someone wants to use it for back-up purposes? It would be something if Hitachi came out with a 10gig mini cf card that could still be price-attractive to the consumer point of view!
Seems perfectly timed to coincide with MacWorld. So that's two announcements we know about now - Tiger and the 60 GB iPod. Wonder what the surprise will be. 3.0 G5s? G5 notebooks? iPonies?
Philip Sandifer's academic website
I mean, if someone has, like myself, that much music available... wouldn't it be more more handy to store it on a computer than with the player? Player breaks up, bye bye music and so on. And is the extra capacity really worth the price?
I usually tend to think the player's storage capacity in relation to how much music I would be needing before having a chance to load other music to the player thingy. 60gb?? 4gb Creative Muvo sounds about right in that sense.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
Does Apple have any plans to beef up their offerings, or are they counting on consumers to keep paying for the iPod's hipster image?
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.
But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.
My music collection is about 1500 CDs... I ripped them to AIFFs in iTunes and compress to other formats as necessary, as codecs (esp. Lame and Quicktime) improve (I use iTunes-Lame for MP3 compression). This translates to about 160 GB of 160 Kbps AACs. So this is big news for me - I'll be able to fit everything on 3 iPods instead of 4.
I'll be really psyched when 80 GBs are available, and then (dream dream) it'll take a 160 GB iPod to make me really, really happy.
This might not seem like a big deal, but when I'm travelling, especially when I'm flying my Cherokee 180-D across country, I won't be able to anticipate what I'll really want to listen to - and I invariably want to hear something that I didn't bring along.
And if you think iPods are expensive, you should price avionics on an airplane. Or really just about anything on an airplane.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Anyone notice that "Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000" but Apple are stepping up production from 800,000 to 1,000,000 per month...where are all the other drives sourced from?
-- Sig meltdown immine...
So is Apple ever going to drop the pricing on the other models when they come out with more "advanced" ones?
The more you know, the less you understand.
Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.
I totally agree. All of my music only takes up 25% of my 20GB iPod. Most of the rest is a backup of my home directory, plus a smallish bootable OS X system and a few apps.
It's not the fastest firewire drive on the turnpike, but it rocks in terms of dual-use. Came in quite handy when I wanted to repartition and put Yellow Dog Linux alongside OS X on my Powerbook.
#DeleteChrome
The iPod is a different thing. It's just a music player with some storage and a cool look. It's the kind of thing that can be designed fairly easily. It requires the iTunes service, but that's also something which any company can set up for not too much money. I guess it gives Apple some "cred" but it also sets Apple up to be priced out of the market when iPod-like things become commodities. Just wondering... Do any iPod users have thoughts on this?
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Of course, 60 gigabytes won't be easy to fill with .mp3 files. I've got maybe 250 CDs collected over the years, and with every one of them ripped I've yet to fill half of my 30 Gb iPod. Until I started collecting audio books.
The real utility of a .mp3 player with that much capacity is the ability to hold multible audio books and audio periodicals. I've come to realize how nice it is to have something to listen to while I'm on break or on a flight that isn't the 30-favorite songs that everyone ends up playing no matter how many .mp3 files they've got. Audio book files are quite large, and to be able to store them and your collection of music files requires drives big enough to be pretty much overkill for music alone.
Peace
It's already pretty annoying to use a 40 GB iPod compared to the smaller ones, just due to the larger rotating mass of the hard drive. You can definitely feel the difference. If the 60 GB drive has even more platters/rotational speed than the 40, then I'd say "no, thanks" to it for that reason alone.
.MP3 files, anyway?
Who the hell has 60 GB of (legally acquired)
You can buy hard drives with rebates for under $50 now. What's going on with the prices ?These microdrives are sexy but the cost $150-200 to manufacture. I don't mind carrying a slightly larger 20 gig model if it's priced right.
In the past, Apple has negotiated "exclusives" on certain high-demand-although-merely-incremental technologies. A good example would be the Cinema display when it first came out - for at least a year it was the only decent hires (>= 1600x1024) panel you could buy.
It wouldn't surprise me if we see the same thing with higher capacity mini-HDs. Apple's surely willing to pay some premium to be the only ones who can ship a 60G mp3 player.
You should be able to do better than that. A cd is 1411(?) kbps. Apple Lossless comes in at about half that so really we're talking 3x as much space max.
harmonious design
What are you going to do with your terabyte iPod?
at LAME 3.96 --alt-preset standard (average ~200kbps for perceptually transparent music), I can get roughly 300 CDs onto about 15 GB, so about 1200 CDs is your answer I guess. That's a lot, but not unheard of.
Jeremy
Insightful indeed. As long as the form factor remains =, then all increases in capacity are inherently good. Even if you're one of those "I simply don't NEED more space" surrender monkeys, you could at least use the space to save backups of all your vital files so, should your house burn while you're out biking around you'll have a remote backup that survives.
Mo cap is better always.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Maybe Apple will also join the video bandwagon as they step up to the bigger drives?
No, in fact it's well-known that the iPod is using HFS+. It was a big issue when the iPod first came out, because Linux users were hoping to use it, and Linux has HFS support (but not HFS+).
As for the Windows version of the iPod, I would imagine it's using FAT32, but I don't know that. I find it highly unlikely that Apple would write a UFS filesystem driver for Windows, just for their iPod.
Personally, I would much prefer if they DID use UFS, since UFS is found on every major OS, except Windows. It would be nice to see a Windows UFS driver, so people's external hard drives would not be limited to slow, nasty, fragmenting, wasteful FAT32.
Everyone else has already said that UFS is the BSD-licensed Unix Filesystem, so I'll just skip that part...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Rumours of a truly next gen multimedia iPod have been circulating for some time now.
People asking who could possibly need 60GB for music storage (by the way, I can't fit all my music library on my 40GB model) are possibly missing the point of the need for greater storage capacity.
Sure, 60GB is a lot of 6MB music files, but it it's a whole lot fewer movie files.
Personally, I think a fully multimedia iPod would no longer be an iPod, but I'm sure that Apple would find it hard not to capitalise on its mega-brand if the potential market for such devices ever became widespread enough.
There are two ways of exploiting Moore's Law.: iether getting more Mbytes or MHz in the same package or achieiving previous size/speed with smaller parts or less power at a lower price. I doubt I'll ever buy an ipod, but I expect most people would rather have a smaller/cheaper/longer playing ipod than one that can store 60GB.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
well, the zen still fits in my pocket and i'd much rather drop a metal encased device on concrete than a plastic one ..
your plan has merits, but one colossal drawback.
The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.
Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.
The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...
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two enhancements to the ipod, the first is easy, second.. not so easy.
firstly, a sandisk memory block that clips into the back. It would double as the stream buffer and also an easy way to transfer large amounts of music from one pod to another instintaniously. This one would be for those people who "jack in" to each others ipods at crosswalks and stuff. Imagine swaping tastes in music simply by switching memory blocks with someonelse. (not completly legal, but admitily something i would enjoy experiencing).
Secondly, a SuperVideo out with Divx Decoding, using a upgradable decoding chip/module.
-- Grimace1975
Or,
"You mean I have to trade in my Creative Zen Xtra 60gb and pay so much more for a basically equivilant device?" (pros and cons exist for both, but, I'd say low cost is a major pro-side)
Hehe.. Actually, I did just get one for a b-day present. They are good overall, I'd rate it as about a 8/10 or so, only because of a few firmware quirks that could be nicer, and the case is designed poorly. (I.e. no window, and strap covers the port you need to charge it.)
But, for far less $ than the Trendy(TM) equivilant, you can have a device which performs the same if not better, has a user-replacable battery, and looks sexy to boot.
Link to the Zen Xtra
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
cheap plastic case, bulkier, heavier. Yeah that Zen is mighty fine....
Besides the fact that I was referring to the new Apple LOSSLESS format, AAC is superior to MP3 at most bit rates.
sound isolating headphones block out background noise eliminating the need to crank the volume. After using these headphones I found it unnecessary to turn it up so loud, an in fact found it annoying to do so as the pain in the ears isn't that fun.
The link is only to show the phones. They are a rip off at 179. I got mine for $135 US.
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