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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.
also refer to the outstanding battery life?
Seriously, I find it funny how as soon as we get some new piece of technology our first instinct is to break it. Honestly think about it. I can't tell you how many things I can't wait to take apart as soon as I buy it. There has to be somehting unhealthy about this.
:)
Give somehting new and unknown to a bunch of apes and the first thing they do is smash it or rip it apart inquisitively.
Guess we ain't so superior after all.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Article on the new iGadget being a failure? Check.
Apple g33k pr0n? Check.
Wow, this guy really DOES have Apple pegged... I mean, at first it was funny, but now it's just creepy...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
If you open up a cat to see how it works, the first thing you have is a non-working cat.
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'
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3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
That was a bit confusing on a Monday morning... You linked the words "more thorough review" to point to the less thorough review.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
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.
Just the other day, I was planning a mountain biking excursion with my flatemate. He'd never been mountain biking before, and he somehow got it into his head that bringing his Ipod Mini would be a good idea.
I tried to convince him that he would break it via collision with rocks or maybe a tree. He claimed that it was a very durable piece of hardware.
To demonstrate, he dropped it to the carpeted floor and bopped it with his foot...
The display shattered.
I think I laughed for a good half-hour. I felt bad about it, but there's nothing you can do but laugh when something so perfectly comedically timed happens.
It wasn't all bad. He just used this as an excuse to buy the new Nano.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
subSystm has a video if the inside of the nano for anyone who is interested
subSystm is a short version of the full episode Systm
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
The article should really be entitled How to Kill an iPod nano as I think that's the real purpose of the article. It must be fun to buy the latest gadget and then find creative ways to destroy it.
Basically the final cause of death for the iPod was to throw it up in the air as high as possible, about 40 feet, and then let it smack down on the concrete. That was the final nail in the coffin after dropping it from 9 ft., dropping it multiple times from a speeding car (10 MPH to 50 MPH) and running over it twice. Pretty durable for a little music player.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
--> 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 --
Will you please please run a review on my Mother-In-Law ??? Gratitudes in advance.
"For our second test, one of us held on to the iPod, jogged about 20 feet" ...which is the average distance a nerd can jog
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.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Honestly, seeing as these are $100 cheaper than the next flash alternative I could find, I'm tempted to just pick up two as boot devices.
One for my Windows machines at work, one for my Macs.
You'd use up about 1GB for the OS, then have 3+GB free for data extraction. Throw a bunch of diagnostic utilities on there (usually a hundred megs or so at most) and you've got a kick ass clean system to test hardware with when you're troubleshooting. And since its got a batter of its own, it's not reliant on having a powered USB port.
Having RTFA, they did actually kill the thing first - It survived being dropped out of a car window at 50mph with nothing but scratches, and was still playing after that, plus being dropped onto concrete from 9ft then being run over by a car. Twice. It finally died when they threw it as high in the air as they could and let it land on concrete.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
So, basically, to sum it up. We've created a whole bunch of advanced shit to take apart and more advanced shit to *use* to take the advanced shit apart... all while being comfortable.
:)
Man, we sure have come a long way!
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I actually have an iPod nano and I will agree, that it really gets scratched up fairly easily, even if you keep it in a sock you still get those little scartches. It really mucks up the nice finish that it originally came with. Ive had my nano for 2 days now and it looks like Ive had it for a couple months.
GL HF!
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
My reason for buying a nano was to get a flash based iPod so I could take it skiing. I have taken my 20Gb 3G iPod skiing several times, but I was always concerned about scrambling the hard drive in a badly timed fall. Also, the battery life was not good enough at low temps to last a full day of skiing. The nano should be perfect for skiing, and the Ars Technica review seems to confirm its durability.
You can draw power from USB, and this new deviced uses it to charge the battery. The smaller 1394 plug standard doesn't supply power.
USB2 speed is only that high in burst mode. Here's a test, get an exteral HD and move 100G to it over both USB2 and 1394. You may be surprised at the difference. The moral? Don't rely on published numbers unless you know exactly what they mean and under what conditions. You'll see why in this simple HD test.
"It is too small"
What kind of complaint is this?
"I can't believe how small this thing that's supposed to be small is. Can you believe they actually made this small thing so small?"
Next you'll be comlpaining about Ferraris
"I can't believe how fast this thing is. Why would they want to make a car that's supposed to be fast this fast? Stupid Ferrari..."
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.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've replied elsewhere in this thread as well about USB and Firewire, but consider looking at Tom's Hardware's review of FW vs. USB for data transfer as well (FW trumps USB, not the other way around).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
So I bought one of these yesterday and the first place I put it was in my pocket that I also keep my keys in. Big mistake. 1 iPod Nano, less than a day old, scuffed and scratched.
Does anyone know of any mild abrasives or similiar that can be used to polish an iPod such as a Nano back to scratch and scuff free brilliance? I'd really like to restore mine to normal and then maybe invest in a protective cover.
Incidentally, what's Apple's problem with making it scratch proof? My mobile phone stays in my pocket constantly with my keys and has done so for a year now. It's scratched to hell all over EXCEPT for the glass over the screen. Go figure.
No iPod supports FireWire 800.
The ones with FireWire use FireWire 400, which is compatible with a FW 800 port the same way a USB 1.1 device is compatible with a USB 2 port, although in the case of FireWire you need an adapter cable to make the connection because the FW 800 port adds two extra pins.
Here's Apple's page confirming that the current full-size iPod has FW 400, not 800: http://www.apple.com/ipod/color/specs.html
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.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Search for it. It's used for this exactly. It's great on CDs/DVDs too.
Your phone doesn't scratch on the display because if you look closely, the display is covered by an hard plastic insert. The rest of the case is a softer (actually more durable) plastic. Apple doesn't seem to want to insert harder plastic over the screen because it would require a bumpy frame around the display. The Mini had the harder plastic, because it was made of metal elsewhere.
Also note that since Apple doesn't use an insert over the display, their displays show rainbows when viewed through polarized glasses due to the stresses resulting from injection molding. Again, the Mini didn't have these.
Nobody makes large plastic things like phones scratch proof all over because "scratch proof" plastic is more brittle and much more expensive to shape. If your phone or iPod body was made of it, the keys would chip the corners off it in no time.
Well, they don't make affordable things "scratch proof". It's usually only used in small areas like the inserts over displays on your phone. This means you don't use much of it, and making flat sheets is cheap and easy.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not so - all of SciFri is podcast each week. They do cut the program into 2-6 segments though depending on how many topics they're covering - so you have to make sure you get all the parts.
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.
The article incorrectly states that the sound quality is the same across the iPod line.
This test and actually, just comparing by the ear, shows interesting results from a number of players:
http://home.comcast.net/~machrone/playertest/play
J
It's true
:-), and put them back in the remotes.
I once knew a guy (who is Korean) who wrapped his remotes in plastic wrap. I thoughtfully took out the batteries and similarly protected them (being careful to cover the terminals too
I wish I could have seen his face when he found it. (He probably didn't think it was funny.)
Charles? Are you reading this? It was me -- I did it.
Back on topic -- The one thing I don't like about my ipod is its propensity to collect scratches. Could they not have used a more scratch resisant material? I guess not.
Ian Ameline
In high school I was showing off my new car alarm to my buddy. I said see you just barely hit it and the alarm goes off. I lightly hit it... no effect. I hit it a little bit harder... and dented the car. The alarm never went off. He laughed his ass off. I didn't find it as amusing at the time.
TODO create witty sig.