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?"

Comments

Some other tidbits

[MadMoses]

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.

Re:Nope

[LKM]

Really? I thought the iPod was a single processor ARM7 derivative made by PortalPlayer called something like PP5020D

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:

The first three generations of iPod use two ARM7TDMI-derived CPUs running at 90 MHz, while later models have variable speed chips with a peak of 80 MHz to save battery life.

Re:My G5 isn't fast enough for a video iPod

[TheRaven64]

Firstly, I don't believe a Video iPod makes any sense. The only time it would make sense would be if iTMS offered video and the iPod had video and audio out so you could play on a big screen. This would probably require some sort of dedicated dock, so you didn't have to deal with cables every time you wanted to watch something.

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.

Re:Nope

[Synbiosis]

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.