6G iPod & Apple's Future

belsin_gordon writes "CNET rounds up what we're going to get from the next iPod and where Apple is heading as a company and as a business juggernaut. [They have the] 100GB widescreen video iPods, Wi-Fi-enabled iPods capable of on-the-fly movie downloads over the air, unlimited downloads from iTunes for a flat fee and the UK finally getting its content-hungry hands on movie downloads. Apple has dropped the 'Computer' from its company name, and is making significant advances into the media-distribution business. It's bringing video to everyone everywhere with iTunes movies and now Apple TV, and the rumours and speculation we've discussed promote the theory that Apple is setting itself up as a major player in the media-distribution industry."

Comments

6 Gig?

[CrazyTalk]

My iPod already has 8 Gigabytes, and is one of the smaller ones. Ohhh, you mean 6th generation. Wonder who else read this wrong.

Re:Portable Video

[escay]

Personally, I think it's a bit big That's it right there. For portable devices, size does matter. On a quick comparison from the archos and apple websites:
Player - Weight - Size
Arch704 - 22oz - 7"x5"x0.8"
iPhone - 4.8oz - 4.5"x2.5"x0.5".

The primary drawback of archos players has always been size and weight - which also happens to be the primary requirement for these devices. if it does not satisfy this preliminary constraint, it does not matter what amazing features the archos provides.

Re:Why

[igb]

The huge advantage that Apple's model has is building the metadata database on the source computer. In the Apple model, the on-device menu of music is built on a fast computer with oodles of RAM and a fast disk, from a database containing all the information. For iTunes users, when you import a track into iTunes, the metadata goes into iTunes as well. When you sync the music onto the iPod, the last move it to construct the byte-image of iTuneDB and copy that to the device. That contains all the metadata, so when the time comes to display menus and titles it's all in one place. If, like me, you have home-brew software based on gnuPOD, you can for entertainment create tracks which have one set of metadata in iTuneDB and another in the ID3 tags: the ID3 tags are completely ignored. My homebrew solution uses a MySQL database for the same purpose.

In the ``drag and drop'' model, the device has to build that database itself, presumably by reading the ID3 tags. That's a nightmare. To build it incrementally is incredibly hard. To build it from scratch every time involves reading the tags out of potentially tens of thousands of files, grinding it into a database of some sort and writing it to disk. On a ~100MHz low-power CPU with a small amount of RAM, out of either flash or a slow microdisk. That'll take forever. And the moment you say ``ah, but there's this application you can run on the host computer'' then you're back essentially with the iTunes model. And that's before we consider the living hell that is parsing ID3 tags consistently, writing to FAT32 filesystems safely and all the rest of the tasks an iPod doesn't have to do.

ian

Re:But who buys Apple computers ?

[DJCacophony]

Archos already has Wi-Fi enabled players, Widescreen players, 160GB HDD players, Touchscreen players, Camcorder players, and all the accessories you can think of, including a DVR station, a helmet camcorder, and an FM radio.
They can play back MPEG-2, .PS, .VOB, H.264, and AAC.

Archos is the real mp3 player pioneer, they paved the way for large hard drive mp3 players with their Jukebox Multimedia. If you want any of the features mentioned in this article, you don't have to wait for the next iPod, because Archos has had them for a while now.