8 & 10 GB iPod Nanos Rumored

koweja writes "The UK based technology magazine T3 is predicting that Apple will release larger iPod Nanos in the near future. From the article, "Munster's reasoning is that, as the touchscreen iPod will likely not now appear until next year, Apple needs to launch something eye-catching in time for the lucrative run-up to Christmas - and bigger capacity nanos fit the bill nicely." Granted it's an almost completely unsubstantiated prediction from somebody outside of Apple, but it is what a lot of people have been asking for since the original Nanos came out."

Comments

In Other News

[ciroknight]

I rumored a 16GB iNewton is in the works. Does that make me any more credible!?

Re:In Other News

[chris_eineke]

iKnewIt!

Re: In Other News

[Vasey]

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxp pro/maintain/sp2netwk.mspx "Prior to Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP shipped with Internet Connection Firewall disabled by default. The user either needed to run a wizard or navigate through the Network Connections folder to manually enable Windows Firewall. This experience proved too difficult for many users, and resulted in many computers not having any firewall protection." It's not a big deal really but seems to me that I'm right.

Wow! Baseless speculation!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh... here's some more... Apple will eventually release a 16 gig ipod Nano! You heard it here first.

Anyway, a 10 gig Nano makes no sense. 8? Sure, but 10? No. It can't be a single chip, and the size difference between it and an 8 gig isn't enough to justify the price difference for most people.

Re:Wow! Baseless speculation!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I've seen product tear-downs that showed the current nano had two flash chips in the 4GB version, one in the 2GB version. Some might have two 1GB chips if it was more cost-effective. So an 8GB nano would have two two 4GB chips. Of course, bare flash chips are rated in bits, not bytes, so the chips might be 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb for the respective sizes.

It might be more realistic to expect to see a 6GB version (1x 4GB and 1x 2GB chip) and the 4 and 2 GB models pushed down in price $50 each.

Re:Wow! Baseless speculation!

[Kjella]

I'm too lazy to actually check out the sources, but wikipedia says it's 1x1GB, 2x1GB and 1x4GB respectively. Since there's 4GB chips already, and apparently room for two I imagine it's a matter of cost. An 8GB Nano would have a quite high price point.

my prediction

[gEvil (beta)]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict that Apple will never increase the capacity of the Nano. Why would they do something as stupid as that?

Re:my prediction

[Andrzej Sawicki]

You misspelled iPod Flea. ;)

Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[kestasjk]

Nanos were made to have smaller capacity because Apple weren't selling a good balance of Minis and normal iPods, if they increase the storage capacity it gives people less incentive to buy a more expensive regular iPod.

And does this really qualify as news?

Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[ozmanjusri]

Not if they bump the storage on the larger iPods as well.

No, there's a break-even point. Even a 20GB iPod will play about music for about two weeks continuously, day and night before repeating. Every CD and vinyl record I've collected in the past 20 years will fit on a 40GB iPod, and that's close to AU$20,000 worth.

I suspect everything I'd ever want to listen to would fit on a 100G iPod, and it would only take a 6 TB iPod to play music continuously for every waking hour of my life without repeats. I wouldn't want to buy anything bigger than that.

Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[radish]

Right, but you forget two major factors.

1) The fullsize ipods do video now. That needs a whole lot more space. The nano doesn't do video (does it?) and so the nano almost fits the "music only" category, which tops out around 20-40GB for most people. The HD based ipods then become more and more targetted at video customers.

2) Lossless. I listen to my music at home via Squeezeboxes, and lots of people are starting to use HTPCs, Airport, etc to listen to the same rips at home as on the go. I know I sure as hell don't want to listen to AAC or MP3 on my nice hifi, so it's lossless all the way. Now I could (and in fact, do) keep two copies of everything - one for portable and one for home. But that's a pain to maintain. Would be easier if I didn't have to worry about space and could store all those huge files on a portable player too. My CD rips are currently around 200GB, and most of it is still lossy. When it's all reripped as lossless we'll be looking at over 0.5TB. Bring on the big portable players :)

Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[teslar]

Nanos were made to have smaller capacity because Apple weren't selling a good balance of Minis and normal iPods.

I'd say the capacity of the Nano has more to do with the flash memory than with any marketing goals. Flash memory is expensive and doesn't come in large-capacity flavours. Once it becomes cheaper and comes in higher capacities, you can bet that there will be higher-capacity Nanos out.

if they increase the storage capacity it gives people less incentive to buy a more expensive regular iPod.

Precisley. Which is why the regular iPods will be phased out, save perhaps for some large-screen video iPod. After all, why would I want a hard disk based mp3 player if I can have a solid state one with the same capacity for the same price? Hard disk players are going to die out, it's inevitable. Regular iPods won't be an exception.

Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[plumby]

There is a point at which it would become pointless, but 60GB aint it. I've got over 100GB of (legally aquired) mp3s in my library, and although there's a limit to the amount of music that I can listen to while I'm out, I don't know when I leave the house exactly which tracks I'm going to want to listen to - greater capacity means greater choice of music when I'm in the mood.

Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[timeOday]

1) The fullsize ipods do video now. That needs a whole lot more space.

But will portable video ever take off enough for that to matter? It's not clear to me how many are buying the video iPod for the video. Even on the plane, it surprises me how few people I see watching movies on laptops, since it's about the only place I ever do so.

Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity

[Overly Critical Guy]

The nanos were made with smaller capacity because those 2GB flash chips were what was available at the time. The chips are already expensive as it is, and the 4GB nano is using two of them. It has nothing to do with "balance." Apple just loves to sell iPods, and if the minis and nanos outsell the bigger versions, they're fine with that since it's more money for them. Steve Jobs predicted the nano would be the biggest selling iPod ever, so they know what models appeal to consumers.

Larger Nano

[Ryz0r]

>>Apple will release larger iPod Nanos in the near future

I hear it's going to be called the iPodx10^-8

Re:Bigger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, you're the first poster on slashdot to manage fusing a HORRIBLE joke with extreme grammar nazism!

Just 10GB?

[mobby_6kl]

10GB? Lame, that's barely enough for my Frank Zappa MP3s.

And what about wireless?

Here is Why...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get a 4GB USB thumb drive for $100 (or get four 512MB and one 2GB bundled together for $108). The current crop of MicroDrives (CompactFlash-compatible miniature hard drives) of similar capacity runs even less.

If a normal consumer can buy these things on the retail market today, Apple really needs to get its act together and start increasing capacity on its lower end or it is going to lose that market to these cheap drives and the simple add-ons that allow playback of music.

Re:Does size matter?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't really want to hassle with changing what's on there when I get bored of the selection.

You don't have to. I have my iTunes auto-rotate tracks on my 4GB nano. It's not obvious, but what you can do is sync the unit to one or more smart playlists. The smart playlists are set to randomly select a certain number of tracks that have been played less than "X" number of times. Right now, my "X" is "1". Once it has been played, it is removed and another track replaces it. With this scheme, I think I can do very well with a 1GB nano.

More Music

[Metabolife]

Great, a 10GB would let you have 2,500 songs (according to apple's rating), this is great business for apple. Now instead of just getting 1,000 dollars from people to fill it, they can bump it up to 2,500 dollars! Brilliant!

Difference between rumor and speculation

[heli_flyer]

There's a difference between rumor and speculation, and this is more speculation than rumor.

nano replaced mini

[fermion]

The nanos were clearly created to replace the minis, which were cute but had limited battery life due to the power requirements of the hard drives, and as they were so small could not have larger batteries.

As the minis were phased out, they had a capacity of 6 gig. I have been expecting the nano to increase to 8 gig for a while. Of course the nano still has a short battery life, and perhpas the added memeory is just going to make that worse.

The 4GB are available, and given Apple discounts are not overly expensive. I do not see a 10 gig nano, as the nanos seem to have pairs of cards. Hopefully they will come out with a 8 gig Nano in the $250 price range, and drop the other prices according. That might be enough space to make it worthwhile. I would also like to see a 2gig shuffle, though that product line also seems to be dead.

why?

[penguin-collective]

I don't see the point. If you're gonna dock to your computer, then you only need memory for one battery charge, and 2G is plenty. If you're going to use a charger while traveling, 10G strikes me as too small for a regular music collection.

I bought the 4G but discovered through use that I could have saved my money and lived just fine with the 1G or 2G model.

Re:why?

[matt21811]

"10G strikes me as too small for a regular music collection."

Actually, 10 gig is almost exactly the size of average music collection when stored in 128kbit compressed format. This BBC article shows that men own, on average, 178 albums (women, on average, own less).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/410 2786.stm

178 (albums) * 650MB (maximum data per album) * 128 Kb/sec (good quality compression rate) / 1411.2 Kb (per sec data rate e on the CD) = 10493.5 MB. This is over just 10 GB to store the average mans music collection.

Well, I'm convinced

[Tim Browse]

Granted it's an almost completely unsubstantiated prediction from somebody outside of Apple, but it is what a lot of people have been asking for since the original Nanos came out.

There are rumours that God exists. Granted it's an almost completely unsubstantiated prediction from somebody outside of Heaven, but it is what a lot of people have been wanting since the original Homo Sapiens came out.

Dvorak's answer

[Midnight Thunder]

If Dvorak had been writing this then it would be:

"Apple needs to allow Microsoft to run Windows on the iPod. I don't believe it either but I love to screw with your head".

It has been done already

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

Hackaday.com recently had an article about converting a 4 GB iPod nano to an 8 GB. Apparently apple only uses 1 flash chip in the Nano to make up the entire 4 GBs, but in fact it has a second spot on the board to attach a second 4 GB flash chip. It wouold be pretty cool to have an 8 GB iPod Nano though. http://ipod.hackaday.com/entry/1234000233073484/

8Gigs?

[Anonymous Coward]

640k should be enough for anybody.

My iPod

[EZLeeAmused]

is going to have 11GB