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."

Comments

Too much space!

[dilweed]

I can;t even fill my 30Gb Nomad. What the hell are you going to do with 60Gb?

Re:Too much space!

[sexecutioner]

Fill it with porn of course!

Re:Too much space!

[stev3]

My 3g 30gb iPod is already full, and I'd love to be able to rip most of my music into Apple Lossless and use it on the new 60gb iPod!

Just because you don't have that much music doesn't mean other people don't.

Re:Too much space!

[rattler14]

Easy (my 30 gig Ipod is full)

-17 gig songs (granted, a 4000+ collection is fairly rare... and i could go to 128 instead of 160)

-Encrypted backup disk images of
digital pictures of friends, family, myself
backup documents from all my classes
family guy episodes

-Standard apple iSync stuff (very small, mind you)
contacts, address book, iCal, etc

I have about 3 gigs free right now (not COMPLETELY full, but close). Bear in mind, my music collection continues to grow, and I have stuff from my office that would be nice to have another backup in my pocket... just in case.

So absurd? probably. But if i didn't have an iPod and was given a choice between a 20,40, and 60... i might still jump for the 60. Always better to have room to grow.

Re:Too much space!

[midifarm]

Not everyone uses iPods strictly for music. I remeber reading several articles about how the guys filming the LOTR trilogy used iPods to transport video footage shot in the field to their editing stations offsite. They work just like a HD, at least on OSX. So having 60GB of storage especially for video or possibly high-end digital cameras or even audio would be very useful, especially since it can be a multi-use device.

Peace

Re:Too much space!

[CaptainFrito]

What's next? an 80G iPod?!?

Next thing you know cops will pull you over just to scan through your iPod's storehouse looking for pirated music. No doubt someone will die choking on the iPod he frantically tried to swallow...

Re:Too much space!

[child_of_mercy]

My understanding is they were making footage in New Zealand and Peter Jackson was in London organising the score, Jackson had to see what they were doing and make suggestions the only fast pipe they had was some distance from where Jackson was working/staying at The Dorchester so they downloaded to ipods and then carried them to Jackson's hotel.

Nearly lost a late cut of the film in a mugging as well if the DVD is to be believed.

Re:Too much space!

[SYFer]

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.

Re:Too much space!

[timeOday]

A larger capacity drive doesn't cost any more to make, so they might as well keep up with technology and keep the product line fresh. Ever notice that you can't buy a 10G drive anymore? Drive space goes for about $0.50 / gig, and that would only work out to $5 which is not doable. If apples doesn't offer a 60gig drive just because it's pointless, the other guy will because it doesn't cost them much extra.

Maybe Apple will also join the video bandwagon as they step up to the bigger drives?

Re:Too much space!

[Anonymous Writer]

Apple's Backup application that comes free with a .Mac membership allows you to back up your data onto an iPod. I recently had to buy a mobile LaCie external hard drive because my old 20 gig iPod didn't have enough space to use it this way and still function as an MP3 player. Considering the importance of backups, a 60 gig iPod would be very useful.

Re:Too much space!

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

Do you have a RAID 5 array of iPods?

Someone must be able to do this, people RAID'ed floppy drives on a mac, why not iPods.

Re:Too much space!

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

nah, they will got right to 60x2==120gig or some crazy shit. Just to mess with people. "Gen 4 iPod:now with RAID 0"

Re:Too much space!

[Incongruity]

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.

While I had thought about this, I realized that my iPod is also the bit of storage that I own most likely to be stolen. Having my critical files (i.e. financial records, tax returns, address books, etc.) on a device that has a (relatively) high likelyhood of being lost or stolen seems like a very bad idea.

Re:Too much space!

[Incongruity]

While I had thought about this, I realized that my iPod is also the bit of storage that I own most likely to be stolen. Having my critical files (i.e. financial records, tax returns, address books, etc.) on a device that has a (relatively) high likelihood of being lost or stolen seems like a very bad idea.

On second thought, of course, you could always encrypt everything that you store there, but that's a more complex backup system and one that I'd bet a lot of people aren't as likely to keep up with...

But yeah, encryption is an option, dare I say a necessity, if you want to use your iPod for backup.

Re:Too much space!

[YouHaveSnail]

I can;t even fill my 30Gb Nomad. What the hell are you going to do with 60Gb?

It's amazing how narrowly people seem to need to define the iPod. And I'm surprised that so many slashdotters can't seem to see past the "iPod == music player" shortsightedness.

iPod is a great music player, but it's also a great way to carry around a LOT of data of any kind.

iPod is also a hardware platform. That fact is emphasized by Apple's recent reorganization into a Macintosh group and an iPod group. At the moment it seems to be a relatively closed platform, but it has a processor, plenty of memory, a big disk, power, and I/O. It remains to be seen how Apple will use that platform, and when, but it's a pretty good guess that they'll do something interesting with it.

Re:Too much space!

[jimmyharris]

If you're using an Apple computer, it's easy to use their built-in home directory encryption and mirror that on your iPod.

Re:Too much space!

[pudge]

Yeah, jeez. My CD collection takes up about 60GB, plus there's other stuff. My 30GB really isn't big enough. Now, in part this is because I use higher quality MP3s, so I can play them on my home stereo, and I really wish iTunes would optionally downsample tracks when it moves them to the iPod. Regardless ... 60GB would be just about right.

And what was that someone said about not storing the MP3s on the player, where they could get lost? Hello, you have them on both. And actually, my home HD busted recently, and the only MP3s I didn't lose were the 30GB of music on my iPod. Next time, I'll back them all up, so I don't need to rerip.

Re:Too much space!

[Babbster]

It doesn't cost any more to make, but I'll bet dollars to donuts (Krispy Kreme, if you please) that Toshiba will charge a premium for the highest capacity/smallest form factor hard drives on the market. While they could knock out the lowest capacity drives and keep the price structure the same (a la CPUs), that seems like bad business. A lot of folks will be willing to pay the extra bucks for 50% more space while retaining the small size.

Re:Too much space!

[Bricklets]

Apples format is hardly lossless, in fact its worse then MP3, listen to it on something other then pc speakers or headphones and you will hear the difference between CDA, MPA and AAC.

Ummm, you are referring to AAC. He was referring to Apple Lossless, which is.........wait for it.........lossless.

Re:Too much space!

[FredFnord]

Take a look in your /Users directory:

[Fnord:/Users] fred% ls -Fal
(snippity)
drwxr-xr-x 4 fred fred 136 5 Nov 2003 .fred/
drwx------ 69 fred fred 2346 2 Jun 17:02 fred/
(snippity)
[Fnord:/Users] fred% ls -Fal .fred
(snippity)
-rwxr--r-- 1 fred fred 7476502528 3 Jun 16:17 fred.sparseimage*

So, basically, in your /Users directory, for every person with FileVault turned on, there are two things.
- A link of some kind to /Volumes/.com.apple.FileVault/username
- A directory called .username

In the directory called .username is an encrypted sparse disk image called 'username.sparseimage'. If you copy it before it is mounted (say during boot) or as another user, you are guaranteed to get a good snapshot of your home directory. If you copy it while it's mounted, you may or may not get something usable.

Have fun.

-fred

Re:Too much space!

[stev3]

Besides the fact that I was referring to the new Apple LOSSLESS format, AAC is superior to MP3 at most bit rates.

You mean?

[nighty5]

I have to upgrade my 40g ipod already!?!

Im only hovering on 5g of songs!

Re:You mean?

[sniepre]

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

Re:You mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sexy, yeah. Sexy like Steve Ballmer.

Enough is Enough

[moberry]

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.

Re:Enough is Enough

[LostCluster]

I'm in the process of "reripping" my entire CD collection at the moment. I've got the extra space, so why should I be listening to 128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999?

Re:Enough is Enough

[Garrett Combs]

Also, an external backup solution doesn't make your stomach sink when you get a ding or scratch on the casing.

I hate scratches. :(

Re:Enough is Enough

[jfengel]

So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.

Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.

Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.

Re:Enough is Enough

[Wesley Felter]

Let me be the first to say "40GB is enough for anyone".

So maybe the 60GB drive is for the mythical video iPod. (Not.)

Re:Enough is Enough

[niko9]

Do you listen to 3:05 minute pop songs? I don't. I have a alllot of classical music I would love to take with me. They take up alot of space.

Re:Enough is Enough

[Wrexen]

A not-unreasonable collection of CDs compressed with FLAC would be pressing the limits of a 60 Gb drive. When you consider lossless audio (or near-lossless like high-kbps mp3/aac), the large drive sizes are quite reasonable. If you only listen to 128kbps pop singles, fine by me, but don't go around raining on other people's parades. If you don't need it, don't buy it, and market pressures will adjust production accordingly

Re:Enough is Enough

[aixou]

128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999

Ahh, good ol napster.

Re:Enough is Enough

[lpontiac]

I'm in the process of "reripping" my entire CD collection at the moment. I've got the extra space, so why should I be listening to 128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999?

On a portable, smaller files means you read less off the hard drive, and you fit more minutes of music in your cache. So larger files should hurt your battery life.

Re:Enough is Enough

[evilviper]

Does anyone really need 60 GB of music.

Not yet, but I'm reaching the high-end of 40GB, and since there's no 41GB drives, that leaves me going for a 60GB unit.

I'm sure lots of people only have 10GBs of music like yourself, but many of us are going with significantly higher bitrates, and music libraries are growing fast...

Re:Enough is Enough

[mog007]

I disagree. Through the millenia that humans have been around the diagnosis and treatment for diabetes is fairly new. From a biological stand point when you get something like diabetes, it's time for you to check out and no longer contribute to the gene pool, but we've evolved to make it so that isn't a problem.

Music on the other hand, has been around longer than medicine. It could be considered entertainment, but it's a very important facet of human life. Almost everyone listens to music in one form or another, it's something that keeps us from going insane with boredom. I'd say it's more important than insulin.

Re:Enough is Enough

[localman]

Because you hopefully have better things to do than to rerip your whole CD collection for an improvement so small you can't possibly notice it while listenting through consumer headphones with your computer on in the background?

But I shouldn't talk. I'm actually considering the same thing since I don't have anything better to do :)

Cheers.

Re:Enough is Enough

[volvoguy]

I currently have a full 120G drive on my PC. Granted, it's mostly FLAC files that won't work on an iPod, but when I finally DO break down and buy a portable it will have to support SOME lossless format.

Ideally my portable would be large enough to store a "backup" of my entire CD collection. That way I can take it with me and free up the space on my computer.

Re:Enough is Enough

[colmore]

I own and have ripped nearly three hundred CDs and have about 400 more on MP3 alone. This is after selling the ones that I don't like, which isn't many.

I listen to all of them. Maybe not all of them on a regular basis, but I can't think of one that I'd be willing to say "I'm OK not listening to that ever again"

It's nice having a big chunk of that library be able to travel around with me.

While I'm certainly not everyone, there are people out there with even more than me. Just because most people are fine with a few hundred favorite songs, or a few dozen favorite albums, doesn't mean everyone is.

Also, how many 60 GB external harddrives let you play music? There may be more economical solutions out there, but the ipod is more likely to be in your pocket when you need it, and the two birds with one stone factor is pretty big for some people.

Re:Enough is Enough

[YouHaveSnail]

Yes it can be used for backup purposes. But...

Backup purposes? Why backup onto an iPod? Hell, I don't see why you wouldn't install all the tools you need to work and carry your office around in your pocket, ready to go at home, at the office, or wherever you find a Mac. In short, the iPod gives you a lot of the portability of a laptop in a much more portable form factor.

The fact that it's a great music player too is almost a fringe benefit.

Yes, there are other small FireWire drives on the market, such as the FireLite drives. They're cheaper than an iPod, but they're larger, not as comfortable in the pocket, and they're lousy music players.

Re:Enough is Enough

[cperciva]

From a biological stand point when you get something like diabetes, it's time for you to check out and no longer contribute to the gene pool

Not necessarily. It has been suggested that the genes responsible for autoimmunity also serve to protect the body against some forms of cancer, in that they make the immune system more likely to attack cells which look slightly abnormal.

If this hypothesis is correct -- to my knowledge there hasn't been any direct evidence in either direction -- then autoimmunity might be a positive genetic trait, since it's much easier to replace a few hormones (insulin, thyroxine, etc.) than it is to detect and eliminate cancer.

Re:Enough is Enough

[Lord_Dweomer]

Same goes for full DJ sets. They typically run over 100MB each.

Re:Enough is Enough

[mbbac]

Neither does an iPod. They're built like tanks. My iPod has loads of superficial scuffs. I don't baby it.

Re:Enough is Enough

[mbbac]

The iPod supports Apple Lossless. It sports somewhere around a 2:1 compression ratio.

Minis..

[Piranhaa]

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!

Re:Minis..

[teg]

Hopefully a 60GB iPod will drive the price of the iPod Mini down. At the moment it really doesn't measure up to your standard iPod in terms value for money.

It sells very well, so some would consider it good value already...

• It's smaller. When trying to make it fit in a small pocket on your shirt, on your arm etc, smaller is better.
• If you think of the 4 GB as a cache of the main collection, it can be plenty. It does require good software to manage what is on the device, though.

July or August, eh?

[Snowspinner]

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?

Re:July or August, eh?

[WasterDave]

3GHz G5's wouldn't be a surprise. What would be a surprise would be if anyone was actually able to buy one before 2005.

Dave

Re:July or August, eh?

[dasmegabyte]

Oh, you'll be able to buy one right away. They just won't ship until 2005.

I think the real interesting question is...

[BodyCount07]

will this bring a price drop to the smaller capacity iPods?

Re:I think the real interesting question is...

[Stackster]

Maybe, maybe not. They might just bump the sizes up a bit, and keep the same price for the "small", "medium" and "large" models (has happened before). You would have to pay as much to get an iPod, but less $/GB. The question then is just what the three models will be (I don't think they ever have sold more than three models at a time).
Either way, they'll surely drop one of the models when adding a new one, and probably the smallest one (15), which whould leave 20, 40 and 60. Or, they could go 20, 30, 60. We'll see.

Use for 60GB HD

[Alcimedes]

for those complaining about not being able to fill the HD, the easiest way to use the space is to reencode the music you already have.

just with some quick calculations i did on my own, saving your music as in a lossless format uses approx. 5x as much space as a 256kb MP3.

so only 12GB of mp3's will give you your 60GB of music.

Re:Use for 60GB HD

[lavaface]

saving your music as in a lossless format uses approx. 5x as much space as a 256kb MP3.

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.

Re:Use for 60GB HD

[Fweeky]

Nope; ALS ha[ds]n't been finalized, and either way Apple didn't use it, as a quick Google will confirm.

Re:Use for 60GB HD

[DrRobert]

The problem with reencoding music is not the amount of space it takes up, but how much it reduces the battery life. Since the ipod has a fixed ram buffer, doubling the size of the music, will almost double the amount of time the hard disk is spinning, which will almost cut your battery life in half. Which is why (even though 128 AACs suck) I use them in the car. The battery only lasts about an hour with losses encoding.

Players with 60Gb drives have been out for a while

[technoviper]

Creative Labs to be specific Here

60GB... but anything else?

[srcosmo]

Will this new iPod have any other features? I picked up an iRiver iHP 120 last month for a good $50 (Canadian) less than the similar-capacity iPod, and the iRiver has optical in/out, direct encoding to MP3 or WAV, OGG Vorbis support, USB 2.0, and an FM tuner.

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?

Re:60GB... but anything else?

[harlows_monkeys]

The problem with the iRiver iHP 1x0 players is that they lack DRM. I'm currently leaning toward an iPod because of this. Most of my use will be for music I rip from CD, but I would like the option of buying the occasional single track from one of the online stores, when I don't like enough on an album to justify buying a CD.

Also, the iPod works with Audible.com. The iRiver does not.

Re:60GB... but anything else?

[nfotxn]

Apple more narrowly designs their products for a variety of reasons. Most people don't have any need for a portable encoding mp3 jukebox with optical IO as the world is mostly made up of non-geeks. Also remember that the iPod is almost a direct conduit to the iTMS (which we still don't have in Canada). So incorporating an FM tuner and on board encoding isn't in their best interest.

As for the "hipster image", well, that's marketing and it's how they sell iPods. Most slashdotters may see it as disappointing that successful products aren't sold on specs. But the dominant group of consumers don't care. They'd much rather have something that's well culturally regarded ("hip") that they can figure out and utilize without too much effort. This is what Apple does and that's why they're so successful with this product. Also be glad that you can get what you want in the iHP 120. But it's unreasonable to expect Apple to market directly to a niche like geeks with the iPod.

Re:60GB... but anything else?

[harlows_monkeys]

And that, my friend, is the stupidest thing anyone said this week

What exactly is stupid about it? Players with DRM, such as the iPod, and the Creative players, can play files without DRM. Players without DRM, on the other hand, cannot play files with DRM (without hacking or kludging).

Hence, the players with DRM provide the most flexibility.

Re:60GB... but anything else?

[xmedh02]

And iRiver has something that iPod/Creative doesn't - it's a standard USB Storage Class device, meaning you can connect it to any computer (PC, Apple) with USB and operating system better than Windows 98 (and there's even a USB Storage Class device driver for Windows 98). It also plays OGG and displays text files, and has directory structure navigation, not some sort of silly database Creative ZENs have..

Re:60GB... but anything else?

[Tony Shepps]

This marks the very first time on /. that DRM has been presented as a desireable feature.

They get a better deal than we do...

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:They get a better deal than we do...

[evilviper]

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...

Well, actually it looks like it was just a matter of Creative Labs eating the extra cost of the CF drives to get the units out the door on-time.

Almost immediately, the CF card disappeared, and it was replaced with an identical-looking hard drive with only an IDE interface (not really a CF card).

If you've got an example of any other MP3 players selling for less than the cost of the drive alone, I'll eat my words...

Re:They get a better deal than we do...

[2nd Post!]

The original iPod cost the same as the standalone drive... so therefore not *less*, but you did get free mp3 playback and battery power for the price of the hard drive :)

Or even the iPod mini... here's the hard drive and the mini only costs $249 vs $385 for the stock hard drive.

Woohoo!

[tm2b]

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.

Re:Woohoo!

[foo12]

Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car. Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.

Re:Woohoo!

[tm2b]

Thanks. I can afford it because Red Hat bought my company in 2000.

Twit.

Re:Woohoo!

[tm2b]

Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car.

Well, with all due respect you don't have a very pricy car then - you'll probably spend more on gas this year. It takes about 900 GB, which costs about $1000, or about $.66 per CD. Worth it, I think, for being able to be totally random access in bulk.

I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving.

Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.

It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.

Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.

Re:Woohoo!

[tm2b]

With that amount of music why don't you just put a computer in your plane? Won't have to worry about harddrive space then.

Funny you should ask...

That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.

On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.

Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.

On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.

Drives?

[TheOtherKiwi]

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?

Re:Drives?

[WiseWeasel]

Toshiba is the one boosting production to 800,000 units per month, not Apple. Apple only uses Toshiba drives in their iPods (non-mini).

Re:Drives?

[martingunnarsson]

India? :-)

Re:Drives?

[colanut]

The drives are probably comming from Toshiba. See, Lee says that they are currently shipping 350,000 1.8 inch drives:

a planned expansion [by Toshiba] of drive production from 800,000 units per month of combined 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch drives to 1 million by the end of this year

The article has some slopping editing. I imagine the 2.5 units are for the i/Power-Books.

Pricing

[maelstrom]

So is Apple ever going to drop the pricing on the other models when they come out with more "advanced" ones?

Re:Pricing

[johnpaul191]

usually the pricing stays about the same and the size just goes up...... often the towers will dot he same thing.... Fast, Faster and Fastest will stay about the same price but the specs will jump up a step. not always true, but often is.

right now
15gig = $299
20 = $399
40gig = $499

it would make sense if....
20 gig = $299
40gig = $399
60gig = $499
or something like that depending on what drives are available

though it depends on what kind of deal Apple get's on the drives..... Apple has said theyw ould like to lower the prices on the iPods as much as possible, but there is a set profit margin. as parts come down in price, so will retail prices. the iPod Mini follows another parts list and plan, and those drives are another manufacturer, so it's price has nothing much to do with this.

Re:Pricing

[drewness]

Well, the way it's worked to now at least is that there are three pricepoints: $299, $399, $499. Currently they are 15GB, 20GB, 40GB. I think last time around they were 10GB, 15GB, and 20GB. So, basically they keep the price the same and shift keep growing the size. Next round could be maybe 20GB, 40GB, 60GB.

more than music

[johnpaul191]

first, there are a lot of people with more than 40 gigs of music.... second, the iPod is also a firewire drive. it can be used for transporting large files (graphics, audio, video, whatever). it is also possible to boot off of OS X installed on the iPod, so you can dump your whole HD on there. The early lists of 10.3 features mentioned a feature called "home on iPod" that later vanished. it seemed you could copy/sync your whole home dir onto your ipod and login to it from any OS X running Mac. if that's really coming, the more space for music AND home dir, the better.

Re:more than music

[pantherace]

Yes & No about plugging it into someone else's box. It depends on what the ipod is formatted & what the box recognizes. Ipods can be formatted to vfat (windows versions) or hfs+ (mac versions). It can also be reformatted, but it's just a firewire/usb hard drive to a computer. Of course, the filesystem on that hard drive does matter a bit if you want to get useful data off of it.

Portable HD durability?

[achurch]

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.

Re:Portable HD durability?

[John Harrison]

The drive on the iPod is hardly ever in use. It spins up for a few moments every 30 minutes to read 30 minutes worth of music into the buffer.

That said, I have a flash based player. It is smaller than my headphones, doubles as a USB key, and holds 512 MB. Now all I need is a program that will automatically put fresh MP3s on it when I plug it in to my computer.

Sure hope...

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Sure hope that this does not infringe on some Microsoft patent... They just might have a patent on "a mobile computing device with capacity greater than 50 gigabytes"... These days, you just never know.

Re:Sure hope...

[baywulf]

No. Microsoft only has a patent on "a mobile computing device with 640 KB capacity that should be enough for everybody"

Re:Somebody's gonna buy it...

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

How long is the iPod thing going to last?

[SteamyMobile]

With all of its other innovations (ie, the Macintosh), Apple sets itself up so that no one else can easily copy its unique design features. For example, MacOS has always had vastly better usability than anything else. It has taken years for MS Windows and KDE to catch up. That hasn't given Apple any kind of market dominance, but a lot of people still believe that if you buy a Mac, stuff just works and is easy and intuitive, and they're more right about that than with any other computer system type.

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?

---------
WML porn - you must have a WML-capable browser like Opera to click that link

Re:How long is the iPod thing going to last?

[mabhatter654]

Actually the iPod is pretty original... You have to see one side-by-side with any of the other players...they're a work of art. They also are more "hackable" than any of the others. They have their own OS, with a "community" of people writing PDA like apps for them... for most people it can replace getting a Palm too! Unlike all the other players trying desperately to lock you into THEIR service, Apple's lets you do lots of other non-music related stuff too...

But mostly it's a work of art... note that the original doesn't have "moving" buttons...they're all touch sensitive/capacitive so they work with fingers but won't trigger bouncing around in your pocket! and that dial is SO cool...no moving parts!!! all of the other players use tiny cheap plastic 'snappy' buttons, not so easy to use.

Re:How long is the iPod thing going to last?

[nikster]

I went to the Apple Store SF last week (it's more like a cathedral of Apple, really - a clean, white, well-lit cathedral to adore sleek designs... anyway).

They had some iPod minis coming in. Buying frenzy ensued, and the color ones (blue only) were sold out in half an hour. Imagine a 50% off sale of Hermes (or LV) bags in Japan - it was kind of like that.

This is a fashion phenomenon, like none has happened in technology before. People buy them because they are sexy, sleek, the thing to have - especially the minis.

So this is not just a piece of tech with a cool look. It's a cool look (if you want to put it that way) with a piece of tech. Therefore, the competition will fail - they don't get it. Of all tech companies, Sony is probably the only one which would be able to launch a successful competitor. But they haven't so far...

The iPod, especially the mini, is about one thing: Being the coolest person in the gym - or in any other social situation. And you don't get there with a Dell, a Creative XYZ or an Archos whatever.

The biggest danger to the iPod thing, therefore, is fashion itself. Fashion trends tend to be unstable and things that were cool last year tend to be not cool anymore this year. But i somehow think the iPod will be spared this fate - maybe the Design is too timeless for that to happen.

Re:60GB on the go???

[bw5353]

Store the music on the computer instead of with the player? Why? Admittedly you should ideally have a backup on your computer as well. But when you're walking in the desert and suddenly feel that urge to listen to Singing in the Rain, it does no good knowing that you have it on your harddisk at home. Better keep your full collection with you all the time.

Audio books

[F. Mephit]

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.

Here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets get this out of the way:

1. 60GB?!? Who would ever use that much space?
2. 60GB?!? Thank god, I'm out of space on my 40GB.
3. Does it support Ogg?
4. Stop whining about Ogg!
5. Apple rules!
6. Apple sucks/is dying/is out of touch!
7. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
8. The Nomad/Muvo/two cans and a stick are just as good or better.
9. I, for one, welcome our excessive HD space Overlords
10. In Soviet Russia 60GB iPods buy You!

Re:Here we go again...

[BodyCount07]

Don't forget:

11. I don't have ears, you insensitive clod!

Re:Here we go again...

[.com b4 .storm]

11. Let's get this out of the way...

Gyroscopic effect

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Who the hell has 60 GB of (legally acquired) .MP3 files, anyway?

Re:Gyroscopic effect

[squidgyhead]

Who the hell has 60 GB of (legally acquired) .MP3 files, anyway?

Ooh, ooh, me! Pick me! Pick me!

It's legal to, you know, shift the format from CD to ogg/mp3. So I took my entire CD collection (~350 CDs) and ripped them to shiny, high-quality ogg files. All legally. No more scratches, no more blips, no more hunting for disc. I'm listening to them right now, in fact.

It's not a crime to own digital media formats, you know.

Affordable harddrive sub $100 MP3 players ?

[zymano]

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.

Re:Affordable harddrive sub $100 MP3 players ?

[gooberguy]

Do you realize how much power it takes to spin up a 3.5" drive? All external 3.5" USB drives need an AC adapter because a USB port can't provide enough power. Even a 5400RPM single platter drive can easily draw 10 watts constantly (mostly on the 12 volt rail). That means a 1250mAh battery (3G iPods have a 950mAh battery IIRC) could power just the drive (not including any MP3 decoding hardware) for about 90 minutes. Don't forget that because of their larger platters and heads, 3.5" drives are more vulnerable to bumps than their smaller laptop counterparts. So your idea for a cheap mp3 player would be great if you want a heavy, power-hungy mp3 player that will destory itself at the slightest jolt.

Sorry to shoot your idea down so harshly, but now you know the reason no one makes portable mp3 players with 3.5" drives.

Re:iPod and UFS

[MisterP]

I think you need to do some homework.

Just because a linux kernel can read UFS doesn't mean it's GPL'd. Almost any unix including commercial ones like Solaris can use UFS. In fact it is the default filesystem used by Solaris. Nowhere does Sun distribute the source to their UFS implementation.

And then there is this:

$ uname -a
FreeBSD xxxx.xxx 5.2.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE
$ pwd /usr/src/sys/ufs
$ grep -ir GPL ./*
$

So are the BSD guys violating too? Not likely.

Re:Somebody's gonna buy it...

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:iPod and UFS

[hayds]

Not wanting to reply to trolls but just in case anyone actually believes this crap, UFS the filesystem used by BSD systems. If Apple are indeed using this filesystem for the iPod (and it is included in OSX), I'm sure they would be using one of the many BSD implementations and wouldnt bother ripping off a GPL one illegally.....

Re:iPod and UFS

[Kenja]

"Why is apple using a GPL'd file system?"

Because its not a GPL'd file system?

UFS stands for UNIX file system, which was originally developed from the first versions of UNIX at AT&T. The file system reached its current status in the 4.x BSD distributions. It it currently used in FreeBSD, NetBSD as well as OpenBSD and the Solaris Operating Environment. Linux support is available, but is not standard.

Now, take a deep breath and repeat after me. Not all that is open source is GPL.

Re:Somebody's gonna buy it...

[damiam]

maybe they'll skip 60 GB

Not reading the article I can understand, but not reading the fucking summary?

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.

In the Year 2012 . . .

[SEE]

What are you going to do with your terabyte iPod?

Re:In the Year 2012 . . .

[IntelliTubbie]

What are you going to do with your terabyte iPod?

Easy -- listen to the newly-released Duke Nukem Forever soundtrack.

Cheers,
IT

Re:Players with 60Gb drives have been out for a wh

[znu]

Right, but none of the existing 60 GB players use 1.8" hard drives, because until now there weren't any. Have you seen one of those Nomad players next to an iPod? "Chunky" is a good word to use.

Re:Arrest Upon Purchase

[JebusIsLord]

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.

Now that's Paranoia!

[mbessey]

"Encrypted backup disk images of digital pictures of friends, family, myself"

Wow. What kinda tinfoil-beanie wearing nutjob do you have to be to encrypt your family photos? Who're your family, the Sopranos or the Bin Ladens?

Re:Now that's Paranoia!

[achurch]

I'd guess he's not encrypting them because they're family photos, but just because he encrypts all his backup data. I do the same, just on general principles--it may be overkill, but better overkill than underkill, no?

Re:Now that's Paranoia!

[mgs1000]

Because they aren't really pictures of his family, he's just afraid to admit that he keeps backups of his favorite pr0n.

Re:Now that's Paranoia!

[ePhil_One]

As the Cypherpunks like to point out, encryption is less useful if only the stuff you want to hide gets encrypted. knowing that 500k is the stuff I need to decrypt makes my life easier than trying to decrypt 3GB of stuff. Plus, the existance of JPEGs likely makes decrypting orders of magnatude worse, since about 90% of the data will effectively decrypt to random data; how do you know you're successful?

Re:Now that's Paranoia!

[Anonymous Coward]

"family photos" means "nude pics of my wife"

Re:Now that's Paranoia!

[Eponymous, Showered]

No, but he's married to Asia Carrera, is Jenna Jameson's brother and Ron Jeremy's son.

Re:iPod and UFS

[evilviper]

What we don't know is that the file system that the iPod uses is UFS,

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...

Re:A bit of an off-shoot...

[Unknown Lamer]

The Neuros beats the Karma in a lot of ways. I know this because I have a Neuros and my brother has a Karma. The Neuros can record from line-in (also has a cheap built-in mic which works for recording lectures) to either MP3 or WAV. It can also broadcast over FM radio (which is great for the car / anywhere someone has a radio but no decent music). It works as a normal HD (USB2 now even). The backpack system rocks too: A new 40G USB2 backpack will be running me $260 instead of $330 for a new player (I sort of dropped my 20G backpack one too many times...). With my now dead 20G backpack (gah, making fun of hardcore kids skanking and getting beat up at a death metal show is NOT a smart thing to do with an mp3 player in your hand) the battery backpack has become a lifesaver; even though I can only fit two or three albums on the 128M of flash (the new Neuros II due out in about two weeks has 256M of flash and looks cooler) it's still a lot nicer to carry the Neuros around than my two CD binders (270 discs now ... that's too many to carry around safely).

The Karma, on the other hand, has better playlist management and a much better equalizer (parametric eqs are fun...but only if you know what you are doing). The visualizations are nice and all but are basically just useless (and battery draining) eye candy. I'd gladly take a Neuros over a Karma any day. If the Neuros would release 1.8" drive based backpacks...the iPod would be dead in a minute. Size is the only thing holding it back now that Firmware 2.x supports all of the things people have been asking for since the beginning.

And if you're looking for just a portable hard drive, you can always get a USB2 backpack from the Neuros store, a power adaptor, and a USB2 cable...all for around $300 total for a portable HD (the USB2 packpacks can operate as standalone hard drives without the head) that can operate on its built in battery for a while (which is great for quick transfers; at USB2 speed I've found that I can copy the entire drive in around 15 minutes and without needed the power cable at all). If you get the urge to listen to music it's only $100 more to get a head for your backpack.

And think about the guy who has 160G of music. Just grab a few 40G backpacks and swap between them; much cheaper than getting the same number of Karmas or iPods. 60G backpacks are supposed to be released sometime soonish too (and 1.8" HD backpacks...in December; they may or may not meet it...but the Neuros II is at least confirmed as shipping June 10 because several resellers have been preselling it).

Re:60GB on the go???

[2nd Post!]

If you have that much music available, I would think you have something like $10,000 worth of CDs.

A $500 iPod is pocket change.

Cheap insurance, especially if you keep your CDs in a safety deposit box :)

Real world - drives are like a tank

[SuperKendall]

Granted the HD does not spin all the time. But I have had incidents where my iPod has been hurled on the floor at great velocity, and also driven along very bumpy roads with a sport suspension and the iPod playing the whole time - and this is the original 5GB model.

I think few things short of a sledge hammer are even going to make the iPod skip, much less harm the drive. I have yet to ever hear the iPod skip for any reason.

I did have a little less luck with a portable photo storage device that used an HD - I was jogging along with it in the lower pocket of my shorts bouncing against my leg while it was writing files from a CF card to the HD. In that case I did manage to get one bad sector on the drive, but that was pretty good considering the abuse it was going through (I wanted to see what extremes it could take for shock while operating). I don't know if that drive (standard laptop drive) was any differently speced than the iPod drive though.

"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look folks, it's simple enough. "Alot" is NOT A WORD. You mean "a lot". That's TWO WORDS. Repeat after me - "alot" is not a word, it is a lazy mistake. "allllllllot" is not a word, it is a symptom of really believing, wrongly, that "alot" is a word and proceeding to spell it without using the space bar.

Can we at least try to spell things the right way? Let's have some coherent discourse, and leave the typos at home.

• loose is the opposite of "tight". It is not the same word as "lose".
  
• lose is the opposite of "win". It is not the same word as "loose".
  
• alot is not a word. You either meant "a lot" (many of) or "allot" (allocate).
  
• embiggen is not a word, not even a perfectly cromulent word. Homer Simpson made it up.
  
• irregardless is not a word, it's an word that idiots use because they think it makes them look clever. "regardless" would be fine. "irrespective" would be fine. But no, you have to show the world what an idiot you are.
  
• virii is not a word. It is not slang. It is not jargon. It is WRONG. It is wrong in every possible way. It's not English, it's not Latin, it's not understood by anybody with an education, it's not understood by anyone except people who already know it's wrong. It is not going to be adopted any time soon. Stop using it.
  

Show the world you care about good communication. Fucking learn to communicate coherently. Classical music my fucking arse, you can't even spell.

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[brodin]

Jeez, what a looser. Irregardless of this I noticed that Windows embiggens all the virii on my boxen.

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[fortunate hazel]

Actually Homer Simpson didn't make up the word embiggen. Jebediah Springfield did.

Spelling my fucking arse, you don't even know your Simpsons references.

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[vomission]

In spite of your errant pedantry, some of your points are plainly wrong.

irregadless is most definitely a word. The OED, Webster's, and the American Heritage Dictionary all contain it as a listed item. (While all "words" are not necessarily listed, all listed items are necessarily words.) It's got nearly a century of documented history. Its usage may be discouraged, but it is nevertheless a word.

virii actually IS a word, however sad this fact may be. Its use is restricted to very specific groups, which qualifies it as part of a specific linguistic register (sort of like a dialect within a social subgroup of a population). So, "virii" is the plural of "virus" in and only in the context of computer viruses being discussed by the sorts of people who think writing them is a good way to spend an afternoon and their ilk. (You may find the discussion of plurals of virus in English & Latin to be found here of some interest. But these facts about what ought to be the correct plural according to English & Latin morphological rules do not discount the fact that "virii" entered one register of the English language via a route that "smacks of pseudo-pedantry.")

And, saddest of all, though this day has not yet come, alot will one day be a grammatical word in the English langauge. Words like "altogether", "instead", "nonetheless", "amiss", "already", and "alright" (the last of which is still in the process of gaining acceptance), all attest to the process by which words that frequently collocate coalesce into new words. Thankfully, we'll probably all be dead before "alot" becomes kosher in formal writing.

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[shepd]

irregardless is not a word, it's an word that idiots use because they think it makes them look clever. "regardless" would be fine. "irrespective" would be fine. But no, you have to show the world what an idiot you are.

Incorrect. Quoted from m-w.com:

Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.

Just to whet your grammarian appetite, squoze is in the dictionary, too. My next mission: Find the word "shooted" in a popular dictionary.

virii is not a word.

Virii is as much not a word as smush is not a word. It's a play on words, and a funny one at that. If you don't share my humour, that's your prerogative. That said, almost 1/2 million people do (check regular google & groups). Belittling people who use it amongst supposed friends who perfectly understand its meaning as a computer related only entity disparate from animal viruses is petty, and, overall, not cool. Especially when you, yourself, know the meaning.

In sum, good comment. :^)

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[CrazyTalk]

Me fail English? Thats Unpossible!

Seriously, someone needs to lighen up. The web and internet have a spelling and slang all of their own, like it or not. I would never write LOL or IANAL or kewl in a document at work, but have no qualms about using that lingo in email or instant messaging. Besides, it's fun!

A'ight?

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[dasmegabyte]

Boxen actually is a word. It's used to test retardation in adults.

DOCTOR: You have 1 box. A friend gives you another box. How many do you have?
PATIENT: Um...2 boxen! It said 'Windows 98 or better' so I installed Linux! Tux si a very cute mascot! Friends don't let friends install Windows! Lol! Bill Gates is a borg lol!
DOCTOR: Nurse, we found another one.

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[BK425]

I love that, a grammar rant in the forum where I first learned that Haxored was a word but only if you put numbers in it. I love the smell of irony in the morning. My pet non word is probly. There, I typed it : ) probly probly probly probly. Ie "Don't put on that blood pressure cuff it would probly explode."

Re:"ALLLOT" IS NOT A WORD!

[tbjw]

I note you offer no credible authority for accepting 'virii', but rather confuse the question by defining 'register'. The state of the matter is the following.

The idea that something 'is a word' or 'is not a word' comes from an early stage in our education, when often we said things that 'weren't' words, like 'brung' and 'sheeps' and so forth. So now we have a definite idea about what 'is' or 'isn't' a word. Changes in our vocabulary and the vocabulary of those around us (think about moving from the UK to the US for instance) mean that we can't afford to adopt a rigid view of what 'is' or 'isn't' a word, since someday, we could wind up somewhere where everyone says 'embiggen', and then we'd look stupid not to use it ourselves.

On the other hand, while we are where we are, there are certain words, 'virii' being a case in point, which are only used by certain people, and not necessarily by a majority. We know that 'virii' is badly-formed, we don't have to use it, and I'm not alone in thinking less of people who use it. So although we can't say 'it isn't a word', we still shouldn't use it. There are plenty of other words which are best unused on slashdot, because they are obscene ('cunt'), or archaic ('purl'), or dialectal ('fleen'), or childish ('moocow') or oxymoronic ('microsoft works') or whatever.

Re:iPod and UFS

[am 2k]

If Apple are indeed using this filesystem for the iPod

Nope, they're using HFS Plus for the Mac version and FAT32 for the Windows version. (There's full read/write-support for both in Linux 2.6, does that mean they're GPL, too? ;) )

Re:iPod and UFS

[Anonymous Coward]

What we don't know is that the file system that the iPod uses is UFS, a file system that Linux can read. How did I discover this? I removed the hard drive out of my iPod, hooked it up to my IDE controller, and typed

mount -t ufs /dev/hdb /mnt

here's a fantastic idea,
instead of removing the hdd from your ipod and potentially voiding your warranty say y or m to;
"CONFIG_SCSI", "CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD", "CONFIG_IEEE1394", "CONFIG_IEEE1394_SBP2"
reboot with your new kernel (or modprobe the modules) connect your ipod and mount as you did before (except it will appear as a scsi disk)

Reinforces the video-capable iPod rumours

[TintinX]

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.

Going the other way...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Re:Players with 60Gb drives have been out for a wh

[pyota]

well, the zen still fits in my pocket and i'd much rather drop a metal encased device on concrete than a plastic one ..

Lossless is a waste of space on iPods

[CaptainCheese]

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...

Extra features

[Grimace1975]

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

iRiver iHP-120

[bani]

The UI and the joystick suck though, and the lack of gapless playback blows. There's also no on-the-fly playlisting function. And there's a serious bug which keeps the drive spinning at all times in many situations.

Sure it could do many of those in the future with a firmware upgrade, but it does none of those things today. And the firmware upgrade iRiver promised for May has been delayed. :-/

Still, the USB-STORAGE class and OGG support and long battery life are enough for me to keep the unit and wait out the firmware upgrades when they come, if ever...

The only other unit which comes close is the Rio Karma -- and that has serious reliability problems with the hard drive. And it doesnt have USB-STORAGE class.

Re:Home on iPod!

[jcr]

In addition, any of the modern Macs can also boot off the iPod as well.

Yes, but...

The iPod really isn't intended to run the drive continuously.

-jcr

Good on ya, man !

[Anonymous Coward]

As a human, I agree with your points completely.

As an employer, I can GUARANTEE you that I won't hire anyone who has poor grammar or spelling.

The job market is such that I can send such people away with complete confidence that someone with a good command of at least one language will appear in his place.

All you lazy semi-literate slobs out there should be ashamed.

Pah! 60 GB? That's nothing. MS xPod will top it!

[michaeldot]

Microsoft's xPod will have 600 GB! It will go for 8 months on a single charge, and cost less than $50.

Hell, we may even give them away in cereal packets!

Please wait for it and don't go buying one of those silly white iPods. Our xPod will be black. Black is cool! It will run super-DRM, hyper-product activated music in the form of the industry standard (it's a STANDARD okay... or else) WMA, which is what everyone wants, in the sense of "here's where you're going today" kind of wants.

And no, there is no truth that WMA stands for "We May Ask for your first child." Who do you think we are, bloodsucking vampires or something. (Looks like we'll have to start using smaller print on the EULAs.)

Oh please please please wait for the Microsoft xPod. I wanna be just like you Steve. I've even started to wear turtlenecks and say "phenomenal" all the time... We wants it, the precious.

two words

[RMH101]

...lossless AAC.
it's apple's new USP.

Software Thieves Will Rejoice

[Vandil X]

Eversince the first iPods came out, thieves have used them to connect to store display Macs so they can drag & drop software to it. Most commonly, Microsoft Office v.X. and Adobe Creative Suite products.

With 60GBs at their disposal, the possibilities are endless.

Home Folder on iPod

[Paulrothrock]

While I'm sure many people here would have no trouble filling a 60GB iPod, the real reason they're increasing the space so rapidly is their new feature Home-on-iPod. This, coupled with home folder encryption, would allow for truly portable computing; just plug your iPod in and it's your Macintosh, with all your preferences set and all your libraries available. Sounds great to me!

Just a quick reminder

[The Ape With No Name]

Just a few reminders of what various slashdotters originally though of the iPod before "iPods are the shiznit" became /. canon.

"iPod is a good product, but nothing to get excited over." - harlows_monkeys

"It's not cool at all. It's just another Mac attempt to have the coolest looking, hippest sounding gadget on the market. It adds nothing serious to the current options. For instance, no Ogg Vorbis support (and yes, I realize it probably decodes mp3 in hardware, but...) and it doesn't appear to be cross-platform. I guess this falls into the Dilbert principle of "the best target market is stupid rich people." Since they'll fall for anything and have the money to burn on it." - ichimunki

"...the "rose-colored glasses that you will need for this to seem like a worthwhile product. What a let-down, geez!!" - david614

"People need to realize that all apple ever really delivers is mediocre equipment that, while it may look really cool, is less technically advanced/powerfull/whatever than competing products that cost 20-25% less." - greysky

"A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else. Agree with the article poster - Lame. Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit (which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners), but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product. A total waste of time." - Ars-Fartsica

"I'd rather pay $100 for a Rio Volt. 700mb of songs per CD with an unlimited number of CD's, provided you change them. Yeah, this should compete favorably with the solid state units, but they've already lost to the CD-MP3 units, IMO." - Fred Ferrigno

"I think it'll sell as well as the G4 Cube. Oops. ;-)" - jaoswald

"And I was all excited they were gooing to release a OS X based wireless web pad. Instead we get yet another portable MP3 player .. "groundbreaking" I think was the term I heard them use to describe this new secret product the other day. How "groundbreaking" can something be when I can walk up the street and buy something with similar (and in some cases, additional/better) features? Sigh. One day Apple will live up to the hype. OS X is cool, and their plastic molding team has skills, but the hardware just sucks." - nebby

"I am very sad that Apple seems to be repeating the same mistake they made with the Cube - great, nifty product that anyone would love to own, except that it's burdened by an unbelievably poor price/performance ratio." - jchristopher (Apple shareholder)

"...this was a VERY poor design decision. This could have been a $150 device if they'd used a regular laptop drive." - jchristopher again

Digital Pics on iPod

[switcha]

or possibly high-end digital cameras

Heck, yeah. If I had an iPod, I'd be all over this media reader. It's a bit bulky, but you can download photos to it, then when you sync up with iPhoto once you get back to your computer, it keeps the shots in the "rolls" you shot them in. Nice.

Re:Maybe you've never used an iPod

[Scythe42]

Of course you can do it without iTunes...

iTunes (and other software) is only there for your convenience. You do not need any special software to access the music on your iPod. The MP3s are stored in a folder hierarcy that is hidden from the Finder on MacOS.

To "enable" the drag and drop feature is a matter of seconds:

http://www.ipodlounge.com/tips_more.php?id=671_0 _1 1_0_C

Of course you can do it all from the shell, its a Unix...
Windows should work the same way.

Re:Ground Loop Hum

[aflat362]

If you got yourself some REALLY GOOD headphones like the shure E3s I'm using with my iPod you wouldn't need to crank your Archos really loud.

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.