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New iPod Design Pictures Leak
Brian Hoyt writes "Apple's new iPod design will be announced Monday. A cover picture depicting the new design from Newsweek has been discovered early. MacRumors broke the story - MacRumors and more specifically the cover itself - NewsWeek"
The only signifcant drawback to the current material used in the regular iPod is its tendency to pick up scratches/fingerprints on its back.
I was also hoping that the new iPod would have an easy-access compartment for replacing batteries.
Still, looks interesting. May have to break down and get the 20GB model...
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
I always thought that the radial design of the 1G and 2G iPods was superior to the "row of buttons" of the 3G iPod. I thought that the iPod mini was even better with the combining of the wheel and the buttons.
Another notable difference here is the darker buttons. I've yet to decide if that's a good or bad thing, as far as design goes. What do you people think?
samrolken
When the last big rev of the iMac got released (flat screen), Time mag. leaked all the details something like 12 hours before Steve officially intro'd it. Obviously, Jobs had a cow over it -- they stole his thunder!
I wonder if Newsweek just pulled the same stunt by mistake?
Man, I just would not want to be anywhere near Steve Jobs right now...
The new ones are supposed to be priced lower than the current models, so you might be able to pick one of the new models up. And if not, the introduction of the new iPods will dramatically drive down the price of the 3G ones.
m y k a r m a i s m o r e p o s i t i v e t h a n y o u r s.
Is it just me, or does that iPod look photoshopped in? At first glance, there is something screwy with it. On closer inspection of the headphone cables, look at the one on the right just before it reaches the ear. A little chunk is taken out, probably from a bad masking job. The earpiece looks like its in at the wrong angle, and the wire is supposed to be shadowed. The thumb holding the iPod is also several pixels past the edge, meaning that either the thumb is cupping the iPod, the iPod is inside of the thumb, or that the iPod was put in.
Best of all, you don't even realize your strings are being pulled. You think you're outsmarting Apple and reading something they don't want you to read.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
...use Privoxy with referrer-spoofing. Any link I click to www.domain.com/foo/bar.html, has a referrer of "www.domain.com", no matter where I came from. Works with every site I know of. I consider it the same way as pop-ups. It was a privilidge, you abused it, I revoked it. No referrers for anyone.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm certainly curious about what this means to the market for iPod accessories. When the 3G came out third-party manufacturers immediately dropped support for 1G and 2G iPods in most cases. Apple as well decided to more or less drop support of the older models up to and including the lack of firmware updates to provide many of the same features as present in the new models (I am told that it would be possible to add such things as on the go playlists and such, but Apple merely chooses not to). As the owner of a 2G I was, of course, upset by the idea that my iPod no longer seemed to exist.
While this design seems to be much more in line with the non-3G what with the return to the wheel as opposed to the independent buttons I'm curious as to where the compatibility will lie. Will earlier models suddenly be supported once again (probably unlikely, the wheel looks to be sized differently and the cutouts for the various ports are different, it might work as a kludge at best)? Will 3G-style products suddenly drop out of sight just like what happened when the design was last changed significantly?
There are some valid questions here that I don't think Apple or many others are bothering to consider. Yes there are advantages to making improved designs, but Apple doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the benefits of a consistent design with only functional improvements.
Unfortunately, due to the way hard drives are constructed, the major part of the cost is the base cost of the hard drive mechanics. Using multiple platters (the actually disks) for large capacity costs relatively little in comparison; using denser platters raises cost virtually not at all. Thus small hard drives still cost a lot, and larger ones cost only marginally more, and the cost of the cheapest models never really drops even as capacity increases. Likewise, the cost of the rest of the iPod electronics is exactly the same for all same generation models.
I've been waiting for my magic price point, $200, for some time now. I'm probably going to keep waiting.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Copy and paste using a file broswer is what you do on the cleap and nasty MP3 players.
One of the TV programs about gadgets did a test of 4 MP3 players this week. They had a newly ripped album on a PC, and they timed how long it took to plug the player in, get the tracks onto the MP3 player, disconnect, and play track 11. iPod was 50 secs. The nearest competitor was 1:50, the longest was 2:35. QED.
How true.
Where I work, we had a Rio on the shelf for about 9 months. I bought it on colse-out (w/ employee discount). When I opened it, it worked without charging! When I took it out of the drawer 6 months later - it STILL worked! In fact, it has never been charged. I assume it still has some charge left now. I should really put it up on eBay.
That's unlike my iPod, which I charge EVERY day.
Yeah, I know, don't Feed the troll:
I had a great Sony Walkman in highschool.
Several in fact...
It was a marvel of minaturized tech: when not loaded with a cassette it slid shut to a size smaller than a cassette! It was tiny and light, sounded great.
It was also the most fragile piece of consumer tech I have ever owned.
Which is why I had more than one... as it was constantly being replaced under warrany... mostly for drops less than 2 feet.
And it cost a fair bit more than the second iPod i bought yesterday for my household. The first of which has taken a few spills and continues to function *JUST FINE* thank you.
I suppose if you're referring to the low end of the Sony Walkman line intended to compete with the knockoffs, then yes... all that bulk and plastic and their very disposeable nature would lead one to consider hurling them at the pavement to test durability.
Better... my ass.
the LCD iMac leak was the day before MacWorld and Steve was going to pull the "one more thing" line and show everyone with the radical new design.
there is no press conference or anything scheduled for this iPod. the Newsweek thing was THE official first notification. and i guess Apple will follow with emails and press releases. ThinkSecret.com was the first site to pick up on the new iPod with some solid information, and one thing they kept saying was that Apple would not be using a press event to show it off, just some unusual (for them) way to publically get the word out to the masses.
ALSO there are rumors from the same sources that a revision to the iPod mini is coming in August. i guess it is known the manufacturer of the mini's drive has made a 6 gig drive (or has one one the way very very soon now?).
Here in Europe the 15Gb iPod is about 450 euros, or more than $500. Remember that the salaries here are much lower than in the US, and the taxes much higher. So, to compare, I should ask you if you would think that $1000 for a 15Gb iPod is overpriced or not. I thought so.
Copy the mp3 files to the iPod - check.
Via USB - check.
Have iPod add the mp3 files to the playlist and play them when I push the play button - no worky.
If I only wanted to transport files I would burn them to DVD and take them with me. The whole appeal of the iPod isn't moving files around, it is playing them as music - and to do that you need to upload them using some bullshit loader. Perhaps the linux crowd has rubbed off on me a little, I'm thinking Free as in Freedom.
Maybe I'm wrong, but according to the documentation if you are going to play the file as music, you are putting it on the iPod via the AppleSoft loader software.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Wow, not only are you spouting falsities (nobody controls AAC, dude, and iTunes for Mac/Windows is a perfect way to manage the music on the thing), I really think you'd buy one if you could afford it, so you're just whining and rationalizing. Just continue to whine and don't ever get your hands on one, since you WILL want it.
You sound like the married guy with the hot flirty secretary who keeps telling himself 5 exaggerated things wrong about her every day in order to stay minimally tempted.
Steve wasn't happy about Macworld moving to boston from NYC. Apple didn't show for it... and now, they'll see that if they'd done it in NYC like apple wanted, they'd have had yet another big announcement to energize the masses and increase admissions... and profit.
It's so much more than a walkman. It's my fourth lobe. (My third being my Powerbook.)
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
You know, I'm quite happy with my little iPod look-alike.
So it does not have gigabytes of storage space or multiple playlists. I don't need that, I'm quite happy with my 128 MiB CF card (accessible as a standard USB storage device) and one playlist. And with the fact that sometime people ask me whether the thing was an iPod.
Not bad for a product I bought used for just about 30 bucks.
Now if they only would get the promised OGG support working...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If that's so, I'd say that's a little childish on Apple's part (and clearly not in the interest of the company, nor shareholders), but if you believe the folklore, The Steve isn't above this sort of thing.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
This assumes you believe Apple's market share claims. However, there is something that doesn't add up. We can believe Apple's unit sales claims, because if those aren't accurate, they would get in serious trouble with the government (becuase they are a public company).
However, if you take Apple's market share numbers, use those to calculate the total portable player yearly unit slaes, and then take that and subtract it from the total yearly unit sales of MP3 decoder chips, you have a bunch of chips left over. Subtract out all the other uses you can think of for MP3 decoder chips...and you are still left with a vast amount that are unaccounted for.
Apple has way more mindshare than any other player, but I don't think their market share is as big as most people think.
...would be gapless MP3 playback, like on the Rio and coming up (or already there?) on the iRiver iHP series. It's just a pain in the butt listening to live or DJ mix CD's with the annoying pause between tracks.
I can't understand why this feature isn't already in iPods - it really should be on top of the developers' todo list. Maybe Apple is so convinced that "nobody listens to albums no more"?
If that's true then it will be far better than the current design, where the slightest touch by a conductive material will activate the buttons. I can't even put my 3G iPod in my pocket without its case because the skin on my thigh clicks the buttons through my pants!
Not that I don't love my iPod. But normally I just have to keep it in the case and use the remote. I long for some tactile buttons.
I thought the idea behind the iPod was that it loaded about 30 minutes of music into a buffer -- a conveniently-sized 32 MB buffer -- so that it would only have to spin up the hard drive occasionally and thus conserve battery power. If that is, in fact, the case, then something else must account for the gap between songs -- something that could probably be corrected with a firmware upgrade. Perhaps it does not start decompressing the next track until the previous track has been completely played? In any case, gapless playback would be a nice feature in my book.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
I can attest to what you said about the Archos player. I have the Archos Multimedia Jukebox (20GB) which does a fine job of playing mp3's, but it's just a little too big to carry around in your pocket and the battery life isn't that great. It's a nice little device in that it can do many things, the problem is it just doesn't do any of those things extremely well (I cannot speak for any newer models that have come out).
This is why I am buying an iPod. I want to listen to music and I want something that can last longer and will fit in my pocket better. It can't do nearly as much as the Archos player, but what it does do, it does much better.
Not to mention they already do just fine selling them at the prices they sell them at now; hell, they're selling the minis about as quickly as they can make them, and they're backordered up the wazoo. At the current "overpricing," demand still exceeds supply. Apple has no incentive whatsoever to lower the price to what Flyboy and the AC want to pay.