All Flash iPod Line-up on the Horizon?

VE3OGG writes "Several news reports are taking note of the opinion of Prudential Equity Group analyst Jesse Tortora, who seems to think that an all-flash iPod lineup could be coming in the near future. While some point out that this would ultimately super-inflate the cost of iPod production, Tortora rebukes them: '...the late 2005 Nano transition to flash provides a guide as to the point at which the previously mentioned non-cost advantages of flash memory outweigh the cost premium.' He believes that later this year Apple will unveil either a 32GB or 64GB flash-based Video iPod. Of course, like all good analysts, he also throws out some far-fetched claims. These include: the next round of video iPods will also include an iPhone-esque wide touchscreen, WiFi for Apple TV streaming, and GPS functionality. Will this be the start of a super-high-end iPod line, or perhaps a middle-of-the-road iPod Video?"

Comments

Not a big surprise

[Bullfish]

As we all know flash based hard drives are coming to PC's (the Mac is a PC too), I don't think this is a big surprise and is probably the way all small devices that have mini-drives are going to go once the cost is wrestled down. Phones for sure will go this way too. It seems like a logical evolution, not a wild new thing.

Re:Golden Plated Requirements

[HAKdragon]

But the original 10 Gig ipod was around $700

The original iPod was 5GB (for $400) with a 10GB ($500) debuting shortly there after.

Re:Golden Plated Requirements

[StarvingSE]

There are a lot of reasons people would go for the 8 gig flash player over the 30 gig iPod. FM radio for one, smaller form factor, and more physically robust. I myself just purchased the Sandisk Sansa e280 for $170. Its a great player; it can play videos, radio, record voice and radio, and holds 2000 songs. By the time I go through 2000 songs, I'll be home from whatever trip I'm on and can swap them for new ones. I'm not interested in storing my entire music collection on an mp3 player; that's what a computer is for. I think a lot of other people think this way.

Re:Golden Plated Requirements

[Kjella]

Man, this stuff is dropping faster than I can pay attention, went to see what a 16GB memory stick costs these days as I thought that'd be a better match than 1GB cards since costs often don't scale - take away VAT and I found it retailing here for 175$ converted to USD. 2*16GB = your 32GB for 350$. I think your $100 quote is high though, I see 1.8" 30GB disks retail for about 80$, and Apple probably pays less for that too. So +270$ retail and maybe +200$ to BOM, they'd have to take a helluva drop to margins (in percent, not dollars) to sell that.

Better price estimate

[babakm]

I posted something like this elsewhere, but... From a recent semiconductor industry report, the latest NAND Flash spot prices (2/5/07) are: 2Gb ... $2.6 4Gb ... $3.9 8Gb ... $6.3 Assuming the same ~1.6x-ish price increment for each doubling of capacity: 16Gb ... $10 32Gb ... $16 Times 8 to get GB gives me a rough estimate of $128 for the NAND chips in the 32GB drive. Add a bit more for the other hardware and contract pricing and a cost of $160 for the storage portion of a 32GB flash iPod at current prices isn't too bad. Note that prices will fall by "later this year". I'd guess a starting list price of over $300, for which you'd get the slim design, better battery life and probably, bigger screen (maybe even some iPhone design elements).

Re:60G of flash?

[TheRaven64]

make the battery user accessible That would make the unit bigger. I want a portable music device to be as small as possible. The competing tend to be 20-50% bigger, which makes the iPod an easy winner in my opinion.

make it play mp3/aac/ogg/flac files It already supports MP3, AAC and Apple Lossless (ALE). You can transcode to ALE from FLAC without losing any data, and ALE requires less CPU power to play back (giving better battery life). Vorbis support would be nice, of course, and could be a deal-breaker if you had already ripped your music collection to Vorbis.

from dirs instead of itunes databases I honestly don't see the benefit of this. Why is it better to drag your files over manually using a filesystem view and then have the device be required to either:

1. Create the DB itself (on a CPU and disk that are slower than your desktop / laptop) or
2. Use the filesystem directly, costing more disk seeks/reads (and hence a battery life hit)

Opening up the format of the DB would be a better solution, so non-iTunes tools for creating it didn't have to rely on reverse-engineering. These days, however, the DB format is pretty well understood, so you can just run the tool that recreates it as part of your unmount operation pretty easily.

while we're at it, why not give it a built in radio and the ability to record from that radio You can buy a portable radio for pretty much nothing, and it will be a lot smaller than an iPod. If I wanted a radio, I'd use one of these. Recording radio might be useful, I suppose, but I'd probably rather do that on a desktop and then sync it with a portable player.

Re:Analyst wrong, no larger screen

[644bd346996]

Most LCDs polarize the light in one direction. If you are wearing polarized sunglasses, you can only read the screen when the polarized light coming out of the LCD aligns with the filter in the sunglasses. If the light is polarized at a right angle to the direction of the filter, then the screen will appear pretty much black. Since the user interface involves modes with the screen being rotated by 90 degrees, a regular LCD would only be visible through sunglasses in one of the two modes.

There are ways around this, though. Circular polarizers are becoming more common in devices to be used outdoors. I can't attest to how the iPod screen polarizes light, as I have neither iPod nor sunglasses handy.