Slashdot Mirror
Apple Replaces B/W White iPods with Color Screens
FlameboyC11 writes "A quick check at the Apple online store shows no sign of the black-and-white screened 'white' iPods. The iPod Photo has replaced them in the 20GB and 60GB categories, but is keeping the same price scale ($300 for low end and $400 for high end). This seems like such a quick switch to color, perhaps a video player is coming faster than we think?"
The iPod photos have lost the "photo" part of their name.
The 30GB iPod is no more.
The 1GB iPod shuffle is only $129 from now on.
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
It seems the first three iPod generations had two 90 Mhz ARM7TDMI CPUs. The fourth, the mini and the photo have two 80 Mhz ARM7TDMI. This information is brought to you by this page.
wikipedia agrees:
Of course, it does come at a higher price (though sans U2 branding).
Cheapest alternative: one iPod, a Sharpie, and lots of patience :)
H.264 is designed to be scalable. It is designed to be playable on mobile phones at the low end, and scale up past HDTV at the high end. If an iPod were to support video, then it would include a dedicated H.264 decoder chip. These are relatively cheap and low power.
As to the resolution question, H.264 is wavelet based. This means that you start off with a low quality image (e.g. 2x2) and then progressively apply additional wavelets to it until you have something that closely resembles the original image. You can adjust the quality and bit-rate by deciding how many iterations through this process are done. If you were copying video to the iPod for watching on the iPod (which, as I said, I think is quite a silly idea anyway) then you could simply[1] remove the highest detail wavelets from the stream, which could be done orders of magnitude faster than decompressing and recompressing the entire stream. This process (i/o permitting) would actually be faster than playback, since all you need to do is an inverse-quantisation, a cut and a write, rather than actually decoding the video.
[1] Well, non-trivially.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The 20GB/color is the same thickness (and, I believe, weight) as the 30GB/color. Which is kind of a shame; I'd have thought they should've dumped the 20GB configuration altogether and dropped the price on the 30GB/color. But having handled both, I think that the extra thickness of the 20/30GB/color models is minimal and acceptable (compared to the thickness of the 40/60GB monsters). In fact, I was toying with the idea of buying myself a 30GB iPod photo to replace my current 4G/20GB in a few months (passing my "old" one to a family member). But now I've got no incentive to upgrade -- the color screen and photo capability is nice, but not worth spending the money for when you've got recent model! And I don't want to have the super-thick 60GB size, either, which is also WAY too big for my purposes!
(Really, can the price difference between the 20GB hard drive and the 30GB hard drive really be worth eliminating the larger model over? Considering how much the price of the iPod photo (now just "color") models has dropped in the past six months, I find it hard to believe that they need to preserve their margins on those two models that badly. Heck, even keeping the 30GB model around at its previous price would've been just fine. I just think that limiting the choices to either 20GB or 60GB leaves way too big of a gap in between.)
Except that has no practical use. People would use the slideshow with a soundtrack option, and would move the scrollwheel as fast as they could so they could get motion.
I think they got something like 10 or 15 FPS... And I doubt you could keep up a consistent rate of motion for any longer than a minute.