Mini-iPod Mystery Drive Unveiled?

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..."

Finally!

[GrievousAngel]

I can ditch my cheap-ass knock-off and get the real thing!

WHy not

[RedHat_Linux_Man]

If you're going for storage, why not get the full size iPod? If you are going for small, why not get a smaller player, there are much smaller ones out there that hold a considerable amount, albeit not as much as iPod Jr.

lot of spinning

[stonebeat.org]

there's not even a memory buffer no memory buffer means, there could be a lot of spinning which might excessive noise. just RLL MFM drive about 10 years ago.
i dont want hear noises of the hard drive spinning in the background when I am listening to Bob Seger. :)

You forget a missing piece...

[gotr00t]

Another important aspect of why this is a good candidate for the drive that Apple might use is because its compatible with the PortalPlayer audio processor... which is the one that the iPod uses.

Why would you?

[Kris_J]

My 20Gig iPod holds my entire music collection with room to spare, about 5Gig to spare I think. My mother's 10Gig will fit everything once she's pruned out some stuff she doesn't listen to anymore (I converted her entire CD collection as part of the birthday present, so she didn't have the opportunity to decide what not to bother about.)

Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection. One of the best features is that you only need to connect it to the PC when you buy a new CD or whatever. 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.

More likely to be $199....

[djrogers]

I'm not much of a rumor monger, but I like this one, so I'll bite. Given Apple's penchant for building quality and pricing things higher than the competition, I'd not be surprised if this were a $199 job (no pun intended). At $199 apple can still be competetitive price-wise, but avoid scavenging sales from their 10GB model only $100 higher in price. $199 is easier to swallow - and if the little baby is significantly smaller and cooler, I'd not be surprised if Apple wound up selling them to a lot of existing iPod owners too... So let's summarize - at $99 they'd likely lose money, scavenge sales from the 'big' ones, have to skimp on the quality of the device, and way underprice the competition. At $199 they'd have a nice margin, and leave more headroom for the high quality and design that could drive re-sales... D

Re:Why would you?

[PepsiProgrammer]

Because some people dont have 300$+ to shell out on a high tech walkman that does little else

Fallacious.

[Raven42rac]

I realize that both are electronic devices, but one is a measure of speed, one is a measure of density/capacity. It would be like comparing kph and kg.

Re:lot of spinning

[dhovis]

No memory buffer on the drive is no big deal if you are just going to:

1. Spin up the hard drive
2. Load content into onboard memory
3. Spin down the drive

The memory buffer on the HD itself is so the electronics on the drive can try to guess ahead what data will be asked for next. So on something like the iPod, where the HD only spins up once every 20 minutes, the buffer integrated into the drive only adds expense and doesn't help performance.

Re:Did anyone else notice?

[juuri]

Ever heard of a pressurized cabin?

Re:lot of spinning

[Pfhor]

Apple puts memory buffer in the ipod itself. It has a 32 meg buffer, loads as much of the songs / playlist into it, and then spins down the drive. Apple could easily pop a small flash chip on there, that acts like the buffer, keeping the database of information on it. Sounds like a pretty effecient design to me, instead of using the minature buffer on a drive, etc.

Re:Why would you?

[plj]

Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection.

Perhaps, because someone [slashdot.org]here cannot afford the more expensive large-HD version, you insensitive clod!

But if you insist, I can post my IBAN account number here, so you can donate the necessary euro-$$$ for me.

Re:Hang on...

[2nd Post!]

You misunderstand ^^

The original 5gb iPod was sold at the same price as the standalone 5gb Toshiba drive... but Apple undoubtedly got tremendous profit due to buying the drive in bulk. Perhaps the same case here: $70 in lots of 100,000, but I am willing to bet Apple can procure and easily sell a million of these. If they can get them at $50 each, and then bundle $50 of electronics, and then sell it for $199, they are making huge markup, no?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Why would you?

[Cybertect]

Go to any home furnishing store and check out the size of the CD shelving units they sell. Judging by that, and my non-musician friends' houses, most people own less than 30 CDs. A cheap, 2 GB iPod would suit them nicely and Apple's going after the the non-muso market with this device (if it exists - I guess we'll find out tomorrow).

Even if you've got a lot of music stored in iTunes, with only a couple of Gigs of data to transfer to the iPod, it would be easy to pick a few albums and load up a day's listening while you're off making a cup of tea.

Re:BOM Cost...

[wankledot]

remember, the price for the toshiba drive that the 5GB iPod used when it was released was $399... which is exactly what the iPod cost.

Re:BOM Cost...

[twiddlingbits]

How do we know that Apple hasn't funded some of the development of this drive via a strategic alliance in order to get first rights to the device at a great price (cost + a small %). That sort of thing wouldn't be announced and would only show up in Apple financials as "investments" with no details. That might be a smarter idea than buying them out, because if you buy them out you get their liabilities (bills, debts) as well as the assets (the drive technology). The margins on disk drives are not real high so paying back the acqusition costs out of profits might take some time. Of course they could sell the driver technology for something but that would be silly as it would remove a strategic advantage for Apple. Also Apple has never shown that it wants to be vertically integrated like the old IBM was where they owned and made everything for thier computers. I think Apple is just going to have to pay what is asked or the developer could always market it to someone else (a iPod Clone made in China perhaps)

Re:More likely to be $199....

[The_Steel_General]

Perfectly fair analysis, but I don't think that price will work. If the miniPod is happening, it's for people with smaller budgets and/or smaller music collections.

$199 is too high a price point to be easily differentiated from the price for the regular iPod. They won't cannibalize from the iPod because they won't sell: Folks who can set aside $199 for a music player will be able to set aside another $100 for the full version. Especially if they do the math and realize they get five times the songs for a 33% increase in price.

Consider further that Apple doesn't want you to do the math. If you start looking at tradeoffs and dollars per minute of music, you might realize that you can get a better deal on a flash memory player or one of those Dell things. Apple makes their money on the Cool Factor, and cold hard logic is dangerous to their bottom line.

$99 breaks the three-digit psychological barrier, and is something that many folks could scrounge out easily -- without thinking. A little voice might try to say that it's more expensive, but they'll be thinking of Courtney Love playing the new Nirvana song from her iPod and all those other rock stars who can't live without their iPods and -- sure, I can afford this, I need a player anyway. Maybe I'll get one for the wife, too.

I was expecting the whole miniPod rumor to blow away, like the PDA they were supposed to come out with a couple of years ago. The existence of the small drives makes it a lot more likely. If it does happen, I'd like for Apple to be smart [for a change!], lose a little money on these first ones and make it up as component prices go down.

But I guess we'll all find out tomorrow.

TSG

Write speed...

[OneFix]

Umh, don't underestimate the issue of write speed...

I may be able to put a 30 minute album on 30MB of space, but if it takes 10 minutes to copy it to the drive, I'm gonna get seriously pissed after about 2 minutes...

Then again, I'm still waiting till the whole battery problem is resolved to my satisfaction...

back of the envelope

[dutky]

The iPod is basically 5 parts: HD, PCB, LCD, case and battery. If I had to build the PCB from commodity parts (bought from someplace like Digi-Key [digi-key.com]) I could probably do it for about $50. The case would cost another $20 (in quantity 1000). An appropriate LCD from EarthLCD [earthlcd.com] can be had for about $30 as well. I don't know what the prismatic LiION cell is wholesale, but I'll throw in another $30 for good measure. If we assume that I could get the HD for the 100,000 count price, the whole thing comes to ~$200.

We can safely assume that Apple can bring some pressure to bear for better pricing on all of the above parts. Given this analysis, I'd guess that the entry price for the mini-iPod will be $149 and Apple knows something we don't about how to keep costs down (or they're willing to take a much lower profit maragin to build market share: not a bad plan if you expect mini-iPod buyers to graduate to higher maragin products in a year or so).

Re:BOM Cost...

[Cranky_92109]

This is my completely uninformed guess: it will sell for $99-$130, BUT it will only play AAC not mp3. So they make little to no profit on the player, but with the player being so cheap it's a huge incentive to buy one and then purchase songs from iTMS. It's the old "give away the handle and sell the razors" model.

Re:BOM Cost...

[LostCluster]

Could Apple be considering selling a 2 GB model at a loss under hopes that users will max it out, and then trade it in for a larger model?

Re:Why would you?

[Mr Bubble]

Some people may also be reticent about spending three or four hundred bucks on something so easily lost, stolen, or dropped.

Re:The "Forbidden" screenshot links

[bubkus_jones]

How many people would buy it if they could only play AAC? Any mp3 files they already have would a) not be playable on the iPod jr. b) have to be redownloaded/bought in AAC format or c) converted to AAC (with whatever additional loss in quality there may be).

There's no way I'd buy one if I couldn't use my mp3 collection with it.

Also, what about people who don't know the difference between the various formats, and when they try to play their trusty mp3 collection, they find it not working. How many calls/emails will Apple receve from this?

It's gotta be $99 or nothing

[__aailob1448]

A lot of people are doing the math and coming up with figures between $130-$200 as a price consistent with Apple's pricing philosophy. For those unfamiliar with said philosophy, it goes something like this:

Final price = manufacturing costs + marketing costs + healthy margin + some more healthy margin + annual GDP of Canada (which isn't much, I'll give you that)

I know I'm not buying an mp3 player that costs over a hundred bucks. Most people won't either.

Now if the rumors are true and apple is indeed planning to release a 2Gb mini-Ipod, They should cut on margins and go for a $99 markup. Sales would be huge and would certainly increase the Itunes userbase exponentially. This would allow them to be in a great position to renegociate their contracts with the Big five of the recording industry and profit from it. In /. speak, it goes like this:

1-sell miniIpod for $99
2-Increase Itunes userbase and song sales
3-renegociate contract with record labels
4-profit!

Not to mention that a significant amount of Ipod users switch to Macs. More long-term durable profit right there.

Unfortunately, corporations tend to favor next quarter profits to the detriment of the long-term. So I'm not holding my breath on this one.

Re:BOM Cost...

[the_2nd_coming]

there is no reason not to include MP3. I mean, they don't make any money from iTunes.

Re:Why would you?

[the_2nd_coming]

because there exists a world of grey out there where the people wandering in it are not buying the flash players because they're overly priced and "underly" capable, and they do not buy the hard drive models because they are super high priced for what they need or want.

a 130 dollar player that holds a few days worth of songs is about where these people will fall in and buy one.

Re:Finally!

[jayratch]

Good [sonystyle.com] question. [sonystyle.com] Especially at those prices. [palm.com]

Obviously, all handheld consumers must be idiots since we voted with our wallets to choose the new color models over the old AAA powered ones.

So in all this "pushing something else" theory...

[Kjella]

iTMS was pushing iPods.

Now if these relatively cheap mini-iPods arrive, they can't be pushing iPods. They'd have to be pushing the iTMS.

So what then does the iTMS now push? Or iPods? iTunes? iMacs? iMconfused?

The only "reasonable" explaination I'd see for a killer price-iPod is to coup the standards war - wmv out, aac in as the de facto standard of digital music.

I find it much more likely that it'll have the normal Apple mark-up. In other words, quite expensive compared to players of similar specs. The primary "sellers" are the iPod brand, interface and iTMS, not price.

Of course, I could be horribly wrong. But I don't see how it'd be in Apples interest to do anything drastic that could hurt their iPod cashcow.

Kjella

$99/99c

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be supprised if they did try to get it as low as $99 - this would go hand-in-hand with their 99cent songs making for a nice marketing campaign...

No Custom Designed Hard Drives at Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Designing cheap miniature hard drives is very expensive, time consuming, technically challenging, and would add absolutely zero value to Apple's product offerings. Apple solidly abandoned the custom components philosophy six or seven years ago, and was headed that direction long before then. All Apple's recent designs rely very heavily on off-the-shelf components, and there's no disadvantage to doing so; as long as it meets the project's design parameters, the designer of the hard drive, etc., just has nothing to do with the overall industrial design (BTW, other manufacturers could learn from that example...). If there's no device that meets the design parameters, that's a strong message to the company that it is too far in front of the technology asking for trouble. Plus, if something is standards compliant, any manufacturer's device could be substituted when a better deal is available elsewhere. So if a mini-iPod is announced, Apple will be using an off-the-shelf miniature ATA hard drive.

Again, looking back at recent history of Apple, I can't think of any exceptions to this design philosophy.

Re:BOM Cost...

[AKnightCowboy]

I'm a dirt cheap geek who is thisclose to actually braving the redneck land of Wal-Mart to get a $99 PC that I can muck around with.

Not to sound rude, but why don't you try getting a better job? Spend the $100 on a decent used suit to use at job interviews or buy a training book with the money. Do something to better yourself instead of wasting your money on toys. Once you have a good job you'll have plenty of money to throw away on toys like 40GB iPods and Powerbooks.

More interested in the other possible uses

[Anonymous Coward]

A drive that cheap might do well inside of the newer 5 megapixel SLRs. It would definitely compete against flash memory at that price.