Sluggish sales of 1.8-inch drives may signal end to iPod classic - Page 2

I don't doubt you, but you realize that you are also very rare.

Not really. I count podcasts as my music collection and with video pod casts 250GB is nothing.

True, I don't need all of them with me all the time, but it's nice not having to think about what I sync.

I certainly need more then 64 GB just for music, so for me - unfortunately - hard drives are still appealing.

Drobo. Love mine for my digital photography as well as my iTunes folder that is bulging with music, Podcasts and video Podcasts.

I really like that I can format the partition for larger then I physically have capacity for (otherwise known as thin provisioning). When I need more space, I just slap in another drive, or if I am full up, swap a lower capacity drive for a higher capacity drive without having to re-do anything. I can buy cheaper lower capacity drives in multiples (the price sweat spot) and then move up to larger drives after the bleeding edge pricing has subsided.

Yes, but many people don't count podcasts or videocasts in that. Just compressed songs.

I never did get the artificial distinction. It's all content I want to listen to or watch while I'm mobile, and it takes up space. Therefore it's a problem

Different strokes I suppose...

At home I rip CDs to iTunes as Apple lossless. My library is approximately 190 GB and I haven't started ripping my dozens of classical CDs yet.

However, I don't see any reason to use lossless files with an iPod. 256 bit is virtually indistinguishable from lossless and given that my iPod is used in places with lots of background noise (cars, subways, walking along busy streets, etc.) even that is probably overkill.

A 64GB iPod should be able to hold all my music plus a selection of podcasts.

Guys, I'm not saying that there aren't honest people out there, but P2P still has several times as many downloads a month as iTunes, or all the legit sources put together. That music is going somewhere, and most of it is going in people's iPods.

One drop and those things bust anyway. I've bought 3 of them over the years and I've had 2 Sad Mac faces too many. I still have an 80Gb that I rarely use but am careful when using it.

My 150 gig music collection is 100% legal. I've been an audiophile since I had my first job in school and could start buying my own music. I've replaced LPs with cassettes, then cassettes with CDs. I think the music industry got their pound of flesh out of me already.

Apple made buying music affordable and even fun again with the iTunes Store. Being able to buy a single song wasn't anything new, but, it has been a very long time (since 45s, actually) since you could do that. Unfortunately, the greedy and stupid RIAA still seems oblivious to all of this.

Maybe it's because you compress your music. I use Apple Lossless, so an 16GB nano only holds about 600 songs. Going on a long car trip, or using it every day for commuting, it's nice to have 160 GB, so there's a lot of variety. I shuffle by album, so I'm surprised and happy when it changes to an album I haven't heard for a long time (my music collection is over 300 GB, and it's all music I really like, and all legal - from CDs I bought, with a small number of iTunes downloads not available on CD).

I disagree - with in-ear headphones that seal out outside noise, I still put Lossless files on my iPod.

My 200 live dead shows take up 1/2 the space add that to 9 g of hendrix and 18 g of pink floyd .. well you get the point. bootleg live shows .

I'm sure you meant "Terapod".

Thompson

Petapod.

Because they have enough music to necessitate the need for so much space?

A "music collector" with only 16GBs of music?

Your dream is merely postponed.

Edit: I mean your teraPod dream

Talk about reading too much into a story. Let's look at what the original article AppleInsider linked to said...

It only said that Samsung and Toshiba were having trouble selling their 250 GB models. It said nothing about lower capacity drives. And Samsung's 250 GB version specifically only spins at 3600 rpm, which makes is less then ideal for iPod use as there are already slight lag in the Classic's UI while it's waiting for disk acess (I believe the current drives in iPods run at 4200 rpm?).

The drives cost between $175-200 retail. I don't know what the wholesale price would be, but Apple isn't going to use anything that would force them to increase the price. And if the drives are of the thicker variety (they are 2-platter drives), Apple would again defer to the slimmer lower-capacity drives to keep the iPod thinner.

One company is offering the Toshiba drive to upgrade your iPod for $295. But it only works in the generation 5.5 iPods due to some imcompatibility with the newer Classic. And if you have the lower capacity 5.5 iPod, you need to purchase a new back because the drive it too thick to fit in the case. Which means it's probably also too big to fit in the current 120 GB Classic's case.

So all-in-all, these drives are too expensive, too thick, too slow, and apparently incompatible with the iPod Classic. Why would Apple use them? And if not Apple, who else would make a market for them? You don't really need a 250 GB drive for a netbook, it's not like you are editting photos or video on one.

Sooner or later Apple will stop selling hard drive based iPods. But lack of sales of 250 GB units is hardly an indicator of that. It only means that Apple may never sell a 250 GB hard drive based iPod.

Quite funny, i was a couple of weeks ago thinking about a 32GB or 64GB Flash iPod Classic, i'm sure there would be a market for that too, not everybody wants a touch or Nano. Could basically look the as it does with a click-wheel, but be much thinner and have an awesome batterylife

250GB iPod Touch. Nuf said.

There's legal, there's illegal, and then there's gray. I have a metric ton of concerts which have never been put out on CD or LP commercially at all, and the legal status of this is somewhat gray - not fully legal, but it would be a hard case to put through the legal system... part of the charm of concerts is audience participation and ambient noise, which you can only copyright if you explicitly do so (f.ex. "live" CD), but otherwise, how do you copyright an airplane noise above, when it is not part of a performance? To disentangle all that - good luck. There are people out there who have hundreds or thousands of concerts just from TGD, and the band encouraged such recordings and trading. I don't think even the RIAA would want to tackle that one. Bottom line, there is an incredible amount of music out there to be downloaded legally (unsigned bands that want to promo), or where the music falls into a gray area, and you never even have to count illegal music downloads to easily get to terabytes of music.

I agree. For those of us with fatter hands, the iPod nano is sometimes too small. A 64GB or 128 GB flash based iPod, twice the size of an iPod nano with a click wheel, and a 24 hour battery life would be sure to fill a niche.

Why we're at it, throw in a pico projector!

The article and posters are over-reacting. There is not one quote from Apple about "end to iPod classic." Its all conjecture. I guess its on par for internet blogs.

You know, this is like being a little pregnant.

It can't be not fully legal. If it's not legal, then it's not legal.

If the copyright holder of the concerts didn't allow it then it's not legal.

This is like the Grateful Dead, which made sure their labels allowed copying of their concerts for fans. That was legal. But otherwise, no.

I feel saddened by this news, but I don't know why. Alas, the era of hard drives in iPods comes to a end.

I listen to several hours a day worth of podcasts, so I have to plenty of them with me. Why wouldn't I count the space I need for that?

Besides, an iTunes library over 100 gigs is pretty much the norm these days, regardless of what that content is, plenty of people still have a reason to want more storage on their iPods.

Yes, I know. I'm getting a few posts here in reply. But you can be assured that most teenagers, and many others as well, just download music from P2P, and fill their ipods with that.

You guys are in the minority.

Most MacBook Airs are sold with 1.8" hard drives, not SSD.

The story misses the notebook angle entirely. Dell also uses them in their compact Latitude notebooks. The 1.8" form factor is not dead yet, and if any density increases are in the pipeline it may yet live on for some time.

What limits the sale of these drives is that they have low capacity for regular notebooks, where 160GB is now pretty much a floor and 250GB and up is common. The thin 1.8" drives have only 120GB. If the same exact size could store twice that, they would sell quite well in high-end, thin machines.

The Classic will go away for other reasons: the 3:4 low-res screen format, the lack of a touch interface that fits into Apple's App store ecosystem, etc. Mechanical drives, as others mentioned, are not that reliable in a music player, and they have no performance advantage. For notebooks, however, they are fine.

At this size they could market it as an iPod/portable Time Machine or something.

I still think they will discontinue it, perhaps this model perhaps one more iteration, but the idea of a 250, or next year a 500 Gb iPod classic does have some appeal, as a portable time machine/music / movie repository.

The only problem the iPod Classic has is Apple.

They keep hamstringing the Touch to make sure it never gets ahead of the iPhone so as to artificially ensure the iPhone is always top dog.

If it weren't for this deliberate behaviour on Apple's part, there would be a HD based touch by now with 200+ gb of storage with a better quality screen, and it would still be cheaper than a 32gb Touch.

Affordable SS memory in useful sizes is always just around the corner, and I suspect it always will be. Unless holographic 3D based storage or other exotics become a breakthrough reality, HD based storage will likely always be several steps ahead in terms of cost per GB/TB, just as it has been for the last 30+ years.

I will make a prediction: If Apple were to release a 160gb HD based Touch that had a beefed up battery and which was 50% thicker than the existing touch, it would significantly outsell the 32gb SS version at a similar price level.

This article is pointless. It seems to forget that there is a significant world wide recession and makes a completely illogical extrapolation from data which is in no way relevant to the main subject matter. The classic still exists because it sells well; It still sells well because significant numbers of people have storage requirements that exceed SS based devices offered by Apple and the affordability of the technology.

If Sony were to make a media player that combined an HD with a nice OLED screen and a 8.1 mp camera out of one of their Cybershot phones, Apple wouldn't see me for dust.

It's unlikely Apple is "hamstringing" the touch in deference to the iPhone. To get a HD in the touch it would have to be more like 2-3 times thicker, not 50%. And to run the UI and not have huge lags as apps load, you'd have to keep the drive spinning 100% of the time (playing music is a very sequential, predictable process so the data and be loaded in advance; this is not the case when you are running different apps), so you'd need a far, far larger battery, making it even thicker and heavier.

And up until the release of the 3GS, the touch had a faster CPU and larger capacity, making it more powerful than the iPhone. I expect in the next two months, the touch will have another upgrade that will leapfrog it past the iPhone in those aspects again. Other features such as GPS and camera were probably withheld from the touch as much to leave Apple an upgrade path to offer with a future release as it was for differentiation from the iPhone.

The Touch has been ahead in processor speed and capacity when compared to the iPhone. What more would you expect?

Who would want such a beast you've conjured up?

That's because one is primarily a music player, the other is primarily a phone. The phone also costs more, so, it's logical that it can do more.

Actually, it would make sense for Apple to offer an iPod Touch with a rotating drive and greater capacity. The iPod Touch really would benefit from a larger screen (for Video as well as web browsing) and need not be a physical clone of the iPhone.

My "ideal" iPod would be an iPod Touch (with all the current Touch capabilities such as Wi-Fi internet access, iPhone App capability, and Bluetooth (maybe upgraded to stereo) with a slightly larger form factor, something that would actually be about the size of a MID (5" screen?) which would have a limited amount of Flash memory and a rotating hard drive. That would reduce the demands on the battery and still provide the storage for all my music and some video.

The timing would probably be "right" when Apple has their own version of the Snapdragon processor ready to go. It should improve performance, reduce battery demands and improve video capability.

Oh, did I mention Flash? Come on Steve, get with it. Without Flash you simply can not access "all the web".

[Edit] P.S. A camera in the 3-5 MP range would offer great utility, especially along with an LED flash and something other than a fixed focus lens. I think if you want more capabilities in a camera you should simply carry a camera. This is just something nice to have along for snaps, but are good enough to make a print of moderate size and small enough (as jpegs) to email to someone when you are at a Wi-Fi hotspot.

By using the same components in much of the two devices, Apple keeps the costs for both down further, and simplifies their cost accounting.

It's tough to give a reason for a new size that would overwrite those advantages. You're calling for a screen that's not too much larger. Other than for watching videos, what advantage would a somewhat larger screen offer>

What some of us have been calling for is a device with a 6 to 7" screen. That would be large enough to have significantly more resolution for computing purposes as well.

But if rumors are correct, then Apple is going to 9.7" for an entirely different device.

Too many sizes causes problems for a developer base to work with. This has been one of the major reasons why the iPhone/Touch has been very successful in attracting developers, which in turn, is why it's been successful in attracting customers.

Fragment that with slightly different machines and you risk all that.

I also have found that LED flash on these cameras is a fraud. Unless your subject is within 2 feet they essentially do nothing. They aren't strong enough to help. A phone would need at least a couple of 1 watt LEDs to make a difference, and that would really drain the battery. No company is using LEDs that powerful.

The 3GS has, as you should know, a focussing lens. And Apple has used that to good advantage, by allowing it to focus as a macro lens, and to have screen based selective focus.

But no matter what is done with phone based cameras, until manufacturers learn that good photos in high light levels aren't enough, it will hardly matter. None of the current photo phones give a decent photo in low light, or even in moderate light levels.

I'd rather have a phone camera that does an excellent job in moderate light, and a decent one in low light with a 3.2 MP sensor, than all of the ones with 5 MP sensors that give crappy photos in anything other that broad daylight.

Yes, LED flashes have very limited range. Some give a bit more range than you seem to have experienced, but your comment is still a valid criticism of the current crop of flashes. If you are making extensive use of a stronger flash I suppose that it could drain the battery somewhat, but that still would be preferable to not getting the shot.

Photo sensors which generate a lot of noise at lower light levels are typically the result of the incredibly small size of many, if not most, of them used in phones. At this point in the development cycle I believe the cost of a somewhat larger sensor should be low enough to incorporate in a phone or iPod. A decent 3.2 MP sensor can capture acceptable images. (The Nikon D1 camera was a 3 MP camera.) The point of my comment about 3-5 MP was that represents "enough" for such a device. It does not need to get caught up in "the megapixel race".

I certainly would have no objection to a 7" screen iPod touch. Frankly, the extra space would make it easier to fit things in. It would still be very compact in terms of carrying it around and would fit in the size range of screens for a MID. Actually, if Apple just did away with speakers so that you either listened with earbuds/headphones or plugged in small external speakers it would simplify packaging and would offer the possibility of much less "wasted space" than on the current iPod Touch/iPhone.

"The rumors" seem to suggest that Apple is moving in the direction of a touch screen tablet, which, I suppose, could be described as an iPod Touch on steroids. It will undoubtedly be priced such that it is not really an option people will consider as an iPod like device. Other speculation suggests that Apple will bring it out as what amounts to a netbook, except for price. This is consistent with Apple's history of denial right up to the moment a device is unveiled, but certainly is not proof of its existence. Still, Apple must be looking for "the next thing" to bring to market.

Cheers

I've played with several phones with LED flash. I suppose, under very limited contexts, they sort of work. But the way it works, the camera would need four times the power to give sufficient exposure at twice the distance. "Real" flashes do better because they have proper reflectors and fresnel lenses to focus the light. But I haven't yet seen an LED flash on a phone that does that. One reason is that they absorb light as well, so with such a tiny "flash" it would even out.


Unfortunately, in experimenting with my daughter's 3GS, I haven't found the new camera to be any better in low light than the old one. I'm not sure what the software is doing, but as on all other phones I've tried, results in dimmer light are random. Sometimes, the image will come out pretty well, but then an almost equal image won't.

Apple, and all other manufacturers, lease get on this! It's the biggest impediment to decent pictures.

I have a Canon D30. The first D-SLR to be considered to be a good pro level camera at anywhere near a decent price. It also has a 3 MP sensor. This was back around 2000-2001.


Many of us like that size because it's about as big as a device can be, yet beltable. Anything larger won't be, which is the problem with a lot of products in this space.


Who knows what this will look like? It does seem as though something in that size is coming though. Too many reports from too many reliable sources.

I'm hoping that this will use the simple OS X interface rather than the iPhone one.

Though it would be interesting if somehow Apple figures out a way to use both. That's just hope though, as the processors are different. I wonder if Apple will go with some unreleased Atom chip for OS X compatibility, or an ARM for iPhone compatibility, or both.

Or a mainstream chip for speed (which could then likely emulate the ARM). YUM!

Yep!

This article suggests that flash memory is cheaper than a comparable capacity HDD. I am not sure that is the case or would remain so due to the volatility of flash memory pricing as you point out.

In my view, the iPod classic design is simply an old, stale, out of touch (pardon the pun) product. The screen is too small for decent video viewing and it is lacking in features which the iPod Touch has introduced, including running various apps, wi-fi and so on. All the iPod Classic does is play music and video. If there were a new iPod which combined the features of the iPod Touch with the capacity of the iPod Classic at the same price point I would think that an attractive product, but I just do not see Apple doing so considering the very limited capacity of the iPod Touch.