Mini-iPod Mystery Drive Unveiled? 434
A user writes "One of the aspects of the '2G mini-iPod' rumour that's so far made it unlikely is the lack of a tiny, cheap, 2G, drive. Well, today Cornice has announced a 2G hard drive (PDF, 100k) that fits the bill. It's available for about $70 in lots of 100,000. The Mac Rumour sites are going faily nuts over this for obvious reasons. The reason the drive is so cheap is that it contains virtually no driver electronics, there's not even a memory buffer - this is the equivalent of a 1980's RLL or MFM drive. At $70 it seems unlikely that the mini-iPod, assuming it's announced tomorrow, will be under $100, but on the other hand the original iPod sold for the same price as the harddrive inside it. Here's hoping..."
Re:Flash Memory (Score:3, Informative)
The cheapest 2GB I see there is $175.
Re:Flash Memory (Score:5, Informative)
Price and capacity. You can get a 2 GB hard drive for $70, and the largest, cheapest flash RAM card I can find is 1 GB for $290 (retail), making 2 GB at least that much wholesale, and probably more. It's very hard to profitably sell an MP3 player for $100 that contains $300 of flash storage.
Wikipedia has the answer (Score:5, Informative)
A similar progression has held for hard disk storage available per dollar cost - in fact, the rate of progression in disk storage over the past 10 years or so has actually been faster than for semiconductors--although, largely because of production cost issues, hard drive performance increases have lagged significantly.
Link [wikipedia.org]
Re:I wonder.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why would you? (Score:5, Informative)
You can back up your computer
Boot off it
Keep track of appointments
Keep track of phone numbers
Play Solitaire
Listen to MP3s
Safeguard $3k worth of music
In fact... it's about as useful as a PC running Windows 95!
I'm joking, but the worth of an iPod is >>> than just an MP3 player. It's a portable firewire powered hard drive that also happens to play MP3s
Try again (Score:5, Informative)
Which one is the measure of speed? HD capacity is a measure of capacity (duh). Moore's law was a measure of capacity (transistors per IC to be precise).
Re:Why would you? (Score:3, Informative)
"...I've owned a range of portable music devices and I'd never ever buy another one that couldn't just handle my entire library at once.
A quick bit of math; Assume 1MB/minute, 2Gig = 2048 minutes = 34 hours. That's somewhere between 3 days and a week. I've gone a month without connecting my iPod to my library. "
For someone like myself, who doesn't feel the need to carry my whole collection with me at one time, nor brag about it, a 2gig iPod at an affordable price would suit me just fine.
I swear, the size of one's iPod hard drive is now the "I've got the biggest dick!" of the 21st Century.
Re:I wonder.... (Score:5, Informative)
I remember working this out a few years back -- the hard drive industry was cranking along at about Moore's Law, then IBM started really pushing, and blew past the competition, averaging 75% improvement annually. And for the last few years, the standard hard drive size in PC's has doubled annually. A few data points from digging on the web:
Summer 1999: IBM 340 MB Microdrive, 5 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2000: IBM 1 GB Microdrive, 15.2 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2002: IBM demonstrates 1 trillion bits per square inch. This is an 'in the lab' technology, so it'll be a few years until it's a product, but it makes pretty clear that there's some room to grow.
Years ago I made a graph of all of the computer's I'd owned, with CPU speed, display resolution, modem bandwidth, primary storage, and removable storage. It was amazing how they all improved dramatically, though in relative terms displays have improved slowly -- in the same time that a 1.77 MHz 8-bit TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM and a cassette tape drive turned into a 733 MHz 32-bit PowerMac G4 with 1.5 GB or RAM, a DVD-R drive (i.e. improvements on the order of a factor of 1 million) the display went from 64x16 character text display (or 128x48 b/w pixels) to a 1600x1024 pixel, 24 bit deep color display, which is only 6,400x as much data on the screen, and the 300 bps modem became a 1 mbps cable modem, which is only 3,333x as fast. Pathetic compared to improvements in storage, RAM and CPU.
Man, I have to buy a new computer. Same display and cable modem, but a 2 CPU 2 GHz G5 would make those curves so much prettier.
Re:Cornice???? (Score:4, Informative)
and would Apple let them pitch it so boldly at other mp3 player builders the day before (supposed) launch?
Cornice makes the 1.5 GB drive that is used in the Rio Nitrus/Eigen. So there's already another mp3 player builder that knows about this company.
where's the data sheet? (Score:5, Informative)
This gives a little bit more info:
http://www.corniceco.com/download/CorniceM
Its Possible (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Other uses (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Other uses (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Write speed... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why would you? (Score:3, Informative)
Now reduce that with flac, or just plain gzip would probably result in something like 100-200GB. Lossy OGG (vorbis), AAC or MP3 could probably reduce it down to approx 50GB (with the vorbis and AAC likely still sounding good) So it's not much more than people hold in their 40GB ipods.
Hah! Never go to Apple for inexpensive. (Score:1, Informative)
Turns out that the device isn't 2 gig but 4, and I guess that's nice. But it doesn't come in at the speculated $99 or even the more middle-of-the-road $149 or $199.
The device (Ipod mini) is supposed to sell for $249. Note that you can save a FULL $50 by buying this device over the bottom of the line IPOD which is $299 (now with 15 gig hdd instead of 10).
Jobs says that the mini is aimed at the $100 - $200 flash device market, but at $249 it's not really as if you can compare it to the flash devices in Best Buy selling for $125.
The IPOD mini fleshes out the transition space between flash and hdd devices (along with the rio 1.5 gig unit - $190), but I'm afraid it doesn't impact my own search for a cheap + expandable unit. The IPOD MINI doesn't even manage to force prices down on other units.
And so I continue on my search for a device that I can expand later to >256 meg with price $100.
poor / cheap geeks != apple's target market
but they didn't in the end (Score:2, Informative)
Re:but they didn't in the end (Score:2, Informative)
Not as sexy, but cheaper ($35) (Score:1, Informative)
I'm estimating my cost here to be:
$20 for CD player
$5 for cd case (also at Worst Buy)
$.36 per CD-R x 24 = 8.64
= About $35 (with tax, etc) for just under 17 GB of portable music
$99 be damned. If you're a true cheapskate, this will work just fine.
Love their marketing tactics (Score:2, Informative)
You can personalize each iPod with a message, making your own statement on it.
BUT!
Here's the kicker, once your graffiti has been etched onto the back of it, it's non-returnable.
So much for their vaunted effort to cover their collective asses when the original iPod's batteries started to croak.