Apple may ax next-gen HDD iPod in favor of all-flash models - Page 2

Yes, flash RAID is fine.

I believe the first shuffle or nano had a couple of 2 gig flash chips in there -- or some size like that.

Apple desperately needs a flash-based iPod. It'll mean no more broken hard drives. Anyways, it won't be long before a larger flash memory drive is a more reasonable price.

Then why was it designed to be bounced around continuously in your pocket?

I actually agree strongly with the rest of your post.

A little simple research will show that there are at least two companies that supply such a database: Navteq & Tele Atlas. These are the two companies who supply maps to Google, Yahoo, MapQuest (AOL), and Expedia (Microsoft).

Didn't Steve Jobs just say in his "Thoughts on Music" anti-DRM manifesto that the average iPod is nearly full? Why then would their solution be smaller capacities? While I do suspect the "regular" iPod might go flash with capacities 16GB and 32GB initially (32GB is really pushing it) the upcoming widescreen/touchsceen Video iPod will stick with hard drives. You're not going to see a flash-based iPod with 60GB let alone 100GB or 120GB for a long, long time.

He didn't say that the average iPod was full - he said that if you filled the typical iPod, only 3% of the 1000 songs would have iTunes Store content.

This report is so dumb.

Question: What's the difference between an analyst speculating about Apple and some random dude with a blog?

Answer: The analyst suckered some company into paying them 6-7 figure salaries.

Question: Anything else?

Answer: No.


Why this report is dumb:

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oh, and home on an iPod.

While I agree that a hard disk can be a "fragile" device it's the reason that all of my music is on a mirrored raid. It's also why you should backup your data and even store it offsite. Further more to use high quality audio takes 10 times the space and thus until flash can be cheap enough to hold 100GB or more it just doesn't work for me. On a 60GB ipod I only can store 2000 lossless files. Not even close to the 10000 I have and I'm still adding. I for one don't like to "choose" which songs to carry as what I might want to listen to at anytime might not be there.

Despite the availability of the technology to track these things (I think even Steve Woz's company, Wheels of Zeuss, promises a similar tracking technology), Apple is NOT going to offer Lo-Jack style tracking of these devices. Please! Won't happen. I guarantee it... I triple-latte-guarantee it!

cut and pasted from the apple website

Todays most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

and google, yahoo, nokia, garmin, tomtom, and microsoft all purchase from both these companies and blend their data into a uniform map product along with automotive providers, etc. Firm #1 is better at some area's of the globe, while Firm #2 is better in others. Put them together and you've got the best possible. And there are ONLY 2 companies that provide this type of data, it is a Duopoly. This is the industry my paycheck comes from.... Apple is not involved as a direct buyer, if Maps show up they will be branded by Google most likely (probally phasing out MapQuest). Apple will not control the data in it's raw format. This is why the iphone in Steve J.'s presentation had a Google widget & not something more 'in house'

I'm also in agreement. I need, at the very least, a minimum of 100 GB for my music storage.

What's your encoding bit rate?

I have 8,846 songs for total of 54.31 GB on my Macbook's hard drive.

Actually, I've got this already and it doesn't need GPS.

See Theft Aware from IT Agents...

http://shop.my-symbian.com/PlatformP...oductId=194884

"RAID" sounds sexy, so people want one, even if it makes no difference for their purpose.

The question is whether these people will pay the $3,000 for a 4 x 32 GB Flash raid for their iPod, or for their computer.

No. I can never understand why someone would want to keep more than a week or so's worth of material on a portable device.

I have over 1,500 lp's in the process of being converted to digital (not fun, I can tell you!), and over 2,000 cd's, plus much video.

I just can't see having all of that with me at all times.

Wow, 55 posts and nobody came up with it should read "Apple may axe next-gen......" not "ax" <-- that is not a word.
Okay, some places may use "ax". I just suggest it should be "axe" as in "Microsoft to axe 20,000 employees in Zune division...".

Best joke of the week !!

Axe is UK-Oxford dictionary, apparently... \ I didn't know in the US it is spelt Ax.

Well, hell, it *should* be fun!! Why are you doing it otherwise? For profit, fair enough. For home, well, it *should* be fun, 8)

Aren't we in the "Holier than thou" mood today? In reality (AKA where people don't post on these forums) people have about on average 10-20 GB of music. There are plenty of people who would be quite content with a 30 GB flash iPod.

How about an iPod Milli, bigger than a nano but smaller than a regular ipod. About the thickness (or less) of a current 30 gb, but with a full touch screen and 20 GB or memory.

Still make a HDD one as well...but also make a less capicity/longer battery life one as well.

Agreed. I think there's a misunderstanding of RAID. RAID has two main purpose. One, to provide a redundant backup. This form of RAID would involve mirroring one 32GB chip onto a second 32GB chip, giving a total capacity of 32GB. Given that the data on an iPod is already mirrored on the syncing computer, this isn't necessary and really just wastes a flash chip. The second use is to overcome speed limitations on hard drives. There's a mechanical limit to how quickly hard drives can read/write data; by combining two drives together in a striped form a given piece of data can be split across two or more drives, increasing read/write speeds. (Example: if a drive can write, say, 1GB per sec, it'll take 1 second to write 1GB, obviously; it would take .5 sec to write 1GB to two striped drives.) Speed is always an issue with computers, but not so much with iPods. Clearly, current HD based iPods (considerably slower than flash memory) are quite capable of reading data quickly enough to play back audio and video. There could theoretically be a speed up in syncing, but the bottleneck there would be the USB2 interface, somewhat slower thanthe read/write capabilities of flash. As such, no reason to do a striped RAID either. Combining multiple flash chips together to make a larger memory space is just what happens with computer RAM, no RAIDing involved.

My take was that the 32GB limit was just the largest single flash chip currently available. I can't see any problem with combining four or more together in a device the size of a full iPod. But, 128GB in flash will be a *lot* more expensive than 128GB in HD at current prices. That would be a lot to pay for better battery life.

I'm not saying that they will. I'm just saying that it wouldn't be nearly as difficult as some would imagine. If they were to do this, it would be better to work on the laptop lines instead.

You don't need either of these companies for this.

Nah! Listening to music is fun. But, after the first 100 or so lp's, it gets pretty boring.

bull,

widescreen iPod with 100 to 120 gig is what's coming next.

Agreed.

Are you performing the conversion, or are you lucky enough to have an intern? Great Pumpkin, what a chore!!!

What is your process for converting your LPs, if you don't mind my asking? Once converted, do you run the audio file through SoundSoap or the like?

I do it myself. and it is a chore. I've been working on it for over three years. I have about 1,000 done. I do them in batches. some days I'll do four or five, and some days, none. Lately, it has been more of "none". I've done most of the more important disks, so I've gotten lazy about the rest.

I use Pro Tools plus a couple of plug-ins that remove pops, noise, etc. I touch up each recording as required.

Raygun is a pretty good, inexpensive tool, but it doesn't offer enough in sophisticated control. I've also played with various versions of iTunes and Toast, but, so far, they don't help with anything other than the basics. I haven't looked at the latest version of Toast.

I've always taken very good care of my lp's. Few have objectionable noise or other annoyances.

Sandisk has recently intro'd a 32 gig flash drive. Larger sizes will come in due time.

They also warned the financial world that that while their normal expectation is to see 50% annual price reductions they may miss their financial targets this year as prices fell by 27% in January and may fall by 60% or more this year. It expects a glut of supply thru the 1st half of the year before new product intros soak up the supply during the second half. So that would imply that the 60% price drop could be all in the 1st half.

Sure sounds to me like they anticipate high capacity products using up the available supply as we move towards next christmas' manufacturing cycle.

I quess the question is how often to go home....the hd space is at home, you carry what you plan to hear/view. i don't need 80 as long as my macbook has it, guys you don't carry your house with you, or in your car you carry what you need for the travel time. and with wireless n, much more is possible for flexibility. BUT battery life is a big concern for any portable device. i want battery life, look at the nano 8gb, it goes and goes and goes.....so if apple is improving the experience any ipod needs to run 16+ hours so you can listen view till you get home or to your car.

i think this is giving the direction of the iphone....i predicted in another post that what SJ showed would be the minimum , come june i think it will be substancially better. that will keep the buzz.
to be honest it makes no sense to get a phone for that price not 3g, even if it had 32gb of storage. i'm going to wait for the 3g phone.

Is that all? Price and Space? Well, what's stopping Apple then? I can see it now -- the iPod Macro, 128Gb of goodness in a 15", 12lbs case!

Yes, it may be possible to buy a 128Mb flash memory card, but the size and cost make it impracticle for an iPod. It very well might be cheaper, and more size appropriate to lash together a few smaller sized chips than it is to plunk in one big one...

The nanos will be bumped. I also wouldn't be surprised if they have larger touchscreens and can play video. But there is no way they will replace the full size iPods with devices that store less.

then tell me, where are you going to buy this data from with the attribution that is needed? TIGER does not have appropriate accuracy for the USA. That is the only other continious data provider in the US, not to mention the globe. All mapping portals on the intnernet get there data from one or both of these firms, as well as personal navigation devises & auto firms. check your facts.

I guess I don't understand the need to carry around 10 movies when the battery life will barely get you through two. Very long trips where you can battery-up but not sync?

... unless they flip the flagship iPod into the widescreen iPod.

Current:

iPod 80GB > iPod 30GB > nano 8GB > nano 4GB > nano 2GB > shuffle 1GB

Next generation:

wide 120GB > wide 80GB > nano 24GB > nano 8GB > shuffle 2GB

That's basically the current lineup with size bumps from top to bottom.

The widescreen would be both the high-end iPod and the low-end portable Leopard device, i.e., handheld computer.

Bump this one

Yeah, they would never replace a model that exists in 4 GBs and 6 GBs sizes with one that only exists in 2 GBs and 4 GBs ones… surely they would never ever do that!

Oh wait. They did.


No, it's slower both at reading and at writing. It's the seek times that are a lot better.


Of course they're possible, but they're unneeded for the iPod. The iPod doesn't use flash drives, which internally consist of multiple flash chips. The iPod uses the chips directly. If Apple wanted 64 instead of 32 GBs, they'd simply double the amount of chips. No RAID needed.


It is a good idea indeed. So good, in fact, that iPods have employed it since day one. All iPods (shuffles aside) have at least 32 MBs of cache; some even twice that.

One thing people are forgetting...transfer speeds. My 80 GB iPod is very fast at uploading music and video content. How fast would these flash based devices be? From my experience it couldn't possibly be any where near as fast. My fastest USB Flash Drive (166x) takes over 45 minutes to upload 4 GB of data. My iPod is like 3 minutes for that.