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

About Time Too!

[GaryPatterson]

The colour interface looks so good on the iPod Photo models that there's just no excuse for it not to be across the whole line.

Sure, you don't actually *need* colour if you just want to listen to music, but it's more vibrant, more dynamic and fits better with the look of OS X.

And the brick game looks a little nicer too. I was hoping for Arkanoid, but there you go. ... but a video player? I don't want the iPod in its current form to play video. I just can't imagine anything looking good on a miniscule screen like that, but I can imagine what that'd do to a hard drive that relies on large RAM caching rather than sustained reads.

A video iPod would have to be very large to be worthwhile (I'm more than doubtful of the video success of the new Sony PSP, but it'll take a while for the results to come in on that). A large unit contradicts what the iPod is all about - a small, convenient device for a single purpose.

Lastly - I don't see why people want video while they're out and about. Audio I can understand - you can easily walk around and listen to music. Video? I look forward to the first hysterical warnings brought on by teens walking accidentally into traffic while watching their PSPs. You just can't watch video and do other things. It's too intrusive.

Re:About Time Too!

[_undan]

Oh, and before anyone asks: "Where do we get the video from?", think about it:

iMovie now supports HD video, as does iDVD, and QuickTime 7.

I know that I would rather edit, export a HD movie, dump it on my iPod and bring it over to a friend's place to preview than waste time burning DVDs of rough cuts.

This shit is cool. And it fits in well with the way Apple seem to be going with iLife.

Re:About Time Too!

[Golias]

Gut feeling: it's cheap to add

I'll go one further and speculate that they reached the point where adding it to the low-end model was probably cheaper than keeping the B&W screens around.

This way, they have one stock display part going into all full-sized iPods. Less inventory management is usually a good thing.

Visualizer

[cappadocius]

Screw movies. Where's my iPod Visualizer? iTunes is great and all, but does Apple really expect me to be in view of my computer every time I get stoned? £:-)

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.

My G5 isn't fast enough for a video iPod

[el_womble]

Lets assume that I can buy video from iTMS. Do I buy a video that fills my nice 20" widescreen (1080i), or do I buy one that suites my iPod (480p)?

Being Apple its going to come in H.264. Thats great. I love playing back H.264. What I don't love is encoding it. It took me over 24 hours to encode a 2 hour DVD. As my G5 can only just handle playing 1080i there seems little chance of an iPod handling it in the near future (hell, my powerbook can't do it). So do I download the 1080i then re-encode for my iPod, or do I download the 1080i version and get the 480p version for free? I don't think so. It seems more likely that Apple will charge us twice, or not offer the 1080i version. As for re-encoding, that seems unlikely too - unless the iPod has re-encoder built into it.

As this is obviously a post designed to generate speculation...

iTMS is not a good place to get movies. A good movie requires 2 hours on continuos attention, and on average I'll watch a purchased DVD twice. Music can be enjoyed in the background and I'll listen to a good song twice a day for a month. DVD is not even like books. In general, you can (even though its hard) put a good book down at any point and still enjoy it as much. Also, DVD take up too much space. iTunes is good, because I don't have to look for a CD anymore. Everything is in one place and instantly accessable. To be equivalent, 1080 would require home users to have close to 1TB of storage. Not unlikely, but not now.

iTMS is a great place for TV. I wouldn't mind picking up a 480p TV show. I watch TV exactly once. I know this, so I don't mind deleting it once I'm done - it hurt at first, but I haven't regretted it once (I'm a natural hoarder). I consume TV differently to DVD. I wouldn't mind there being advertisements. I wouldn't mind them tracking my viewing habits and giving me adverts that I want. I would like to be able to tell my iPod that I'm interested in a product and to add the products site to my 'adverts' bookmark folder. In this respect I'd expect Apple to step into the same role as a conventional network - just with a much larger audience. But in return I'd expect the content to be free. They could sell me an add free 1080i, as long as it had no adverts and I was free to burn it to Blu-ray and the cost was similar to a song. File size aside - $5 for a 60 minute show, that I watch once seems expensive - $20 a month all you can eat, now your talking.

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.