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Ars Technica's iPod nano Dissection
starwindsurfer wrote to mention an Ars Technica review of the iPod nano in which they autopsy the cute little guy to find out what makes him tick. A more thorough review than the one we ran last week. From the article: "At this point we were astounded that the iPod nano was still working properly, albeit with a broken display. Because we had honestly expected the iPod nano to break by this time, we were forced to depart from our planned schedule of destruction and try and run over it with the car. Surely, we thought, it could never withstand the crushing power of German automotive engineering." Update: 09/12 14:58 GMT by Z : Changed linking words to previous article for clarity. Monday fuzziness.
Size of the iPod never really mattered to me, the 30 GB photo is small enough. What they should consentrate on is making it scratch proof, I can't stand so many scratches. Cases do not work so well, they still scratch and add lots of bulk.
Treat hardware really roughly and it will break.
I am not sold on this. It is too small and costs too much. But I guess if I was driving 55 in my convertible, I'd be able to hear the playback over my car stereo crystal clear.
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What I don't understand is why, oh why hasn't apple incorporated an FM tuner into their iPod line yet?? Creative and iRiver have it on their models, it can't be that hard to implement. They are priced competitively as well so i can't be a cost issue.
Seriously, for me the downside of the Nano is the lack of FM tuner. Mp3's are great, but sometimes you just want to listen to radio.
I have been looking at getting an mp3 player for quite some time, and I thought the Nano was going to be my thing. But I will probably just wait until iRiver comes out with their clone with the FM tuner on it.
I got nothin'
Their choices for stress tests were less than ideal. I'm never going to drop my ipod out of a moving car. What would have been good was some tests that would tend to bend the ipod rather than just impact tests. Instead of just sitting on it, put it in the back pocket of some tight jeans and sit down. For that matter, putting it in the coin pocket of some tight jeans and sitting down seems like it would put some stress on it.
It will break with 100% certainty.
They did kill it first. Then they autopsied it.
Oh yea.. Join the pyramid - you may get a free nano
Nah, they're playing to a solid-state, no-moving-part gizmo's strengths. Hell, on my cheap mobile phone (Motorola V171) I once was troubleshooting what ended up being poor interface design (if the PIN is entered within the first 30 seconds of the "Enter PIN" message appearing, the thing would accept it, start up, wait 10 seconds, find no network, reboot and ask for the PIN again). I had gotten to the point in the troubleshooting tree that reads:
14) Throw phone out of Fifth-story window
Darn thing didn't even scratch.
I dunno about the nano, but if it's anything like similarly-shaped solid state consumer electronic devices, the weak spot is gonna be sustained torque. Take that thing, and put it in a vice to simulate supertight pants. Apply sustained forces for long periods and see if the case deforms, loosening a critical connection. Put it in one of those paint-shakers for a couple hours to simulate it being worn by a pogo-mad punkrockers.
Blunt trauma kills, but most of my devices die from "a long illness".
Surely, we thought, it could never withstand the crushing power of German automotive engineering.
And it finally gets funny!
Anyway: Thin objects tend to survive being driven over more than thicker objects. If the object is thin enough, the tire even stays in contact with the road, causing a lot less pressure on the object than you might expect.
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Because regular iPods support Firewire 800, which all Power Macs also support, and which trumps USB 2.0's bandwidth by a healthy margin.
riiiiight... because we all know that those leetle teeny hard drives are soooooo fast, much much faster than the data rate of a regular old firewire 400 connection.
music lover since 1969
Thus we get the truth, most people feel customer service is crap when they dont get anything out of it they feel they should, even if they go in fully knowing they wont because it was their own stupidity that broke it.
And considering I have Apples from 84 and on still working perfectly, saying Apple products arnt durable is a lie. They freaking shot a old iMac with a gun and it still worked, and numerous Apple systems have been trashed only to work perfectly once plugged in.
somehow I think this entire post was simply a advertisement for AbsoluteMac.
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I abuse the hell out of my Palm, but I treat my iPod with kid gloves.
Watch CPU usage too.
;-)
Oh, and move your mouse around while doing the transfer
Hope you don't have USB speakers attached as well.
USB is a shared medium, and has some pretty neat traffic handling, but its still shared. Firewire is designed to be a dedicated host-to-host high-bandwidth data transfer medium.
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No, Apple is simply walking the fine line between enforcing limitations that consumers will generally accept, and limitations that will kill sales.
Neglect to provide a way to rip CDs, and most consumers will walk away. Neglect to include an FM radio, and you'll lose a few sales, but not many.
If Apple thought they could sell a device that could only be populated from iTMS, do you think for a second they wouldn't do just that?
This review is not applicable to the current discussion.
The discussion is about Firewire performance WITH RESPECT to the Ipod (in particular, the Nano with flash memory). Tom's review tests DESKTOP HARD DRIVES with an order of magnitude faster transfer rates than Nano.
The benchmarks in that article show that Firewire 400 has about a 10% lead over USB 2.0 for larger, faster drives, and about a 5% lead for slower drives. Obviously, it is the slightly increased access time for USB2 which hurts it in high-performance situations...but as maximum media transfer rates go down, the small increase in access time becomes insignificant.
Given that the Nano is a flash-based device, and couldn't hope to have a write speed faster than 4MB/s (there's no way they're offering higher-speed flash at those prices), there's little gained in offering Firewire.
This is the kind of thing USB2 was intended for. CHEAP, UNIVERSAL connection technology that is "good enough" for most cases. Firewire 400, as popular as it has become, still cannot offer even half the total marketshare USB can. And for a device like this, where the size of the board is the limiting factor (instead of the size of the drive on other iPods), each additional feature (chipset, busses and external connector) makes the board that much larger.
YES, Firewire 800 is freaking fast. NO, you don't need it unless you have devices on the bleeding-edge of performance. Not to mention you can hardly take advantage of it anywhere because only Powermacs and a handful of PCs support Firewire 800 speed.
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Most people (non geeks) want something that looks nice, plays mp3s, and *just works*.
I did my homework for a while before I bought a mp3 player, and decided on the iAudio 5, which is a nice little player. It plays oggs, works in Linux, and is pretty nice looking...but the battery life sucks on it. The control interface is also somewhat clumsy, and the build quality just isn't that of an iPod.
There's always going to be trade-offs, but Apple still puts out the most well rounded player IMHO.
It's not very expensive to buy a soldering iron and a roll of solder, and I think if you're so inclined as to actually open up your nano in the first place you'd be able to solder on a new battery. The process would take all of 30 seconds to remove the old wires and attach the new ones. It's not rocket science.
As the Old Wise labrats say: if you want to reduce the reliability of something, add a connector, if it is still too reliable, add sockets.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Read the article, they ran over the friggin thing with a car. It's durable.
That's what Apple should do now. If they do this, they'll have the best portable music player, bar none. As it is now, they have a great player with a critical flaw. I won't buy it until they fix that.
Stop ignoring the music lovers, Apple!!
When my mom mentioned how crappy the staff is at the apple stores, they responded with 'Yeah, we get those kind of complaints all the time.'
They might say they get complaints like that all the time, but they're not about to tell a customer (and a mom) that they're full of shit. You have to ask the staff whether those complaints are valid or not.
USB was designed by the *marketing department* Intel to be dependent upon your main CPU. That way, you have an incentive to buy a faster Intel CPU. Apple, on the other hand, designed Firewire to work intelligently between devices.
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