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8 & 10 GB iPod Nanos Rumored 238

Posted by CowboyNeal from the on-the-horizon dept.
koweja writes "The UK based technology magazine T3 is predicting that Apple will release larger iPod Nanos in the near future. From the article, "Munster's reasoning is that, as the touchscreen iPod will likely not now appear until next year, Apple needs to launch something eye-catching in time for the lucrative run-up to Christmas - and bigger capacity nanos fit the bill nicely." Granted it's an almost completely unsubstantiated prediction from somebody outside of Apple, but it is what a lot of people have been asking for since the original Nanos came out."
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8 & 10 GB iPod Nanos Rumored More

8 & 10 GB iPod Nanos Rumored

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  • In Other News (Score:5, Funny)

    by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @09:48AM (#15180449)
    I rumored a 16GB iNewton is in the works. Does that make me any more credible!?

    • Re:In Other News (Score:5, Funny)

      by chris_eineke ( 634570 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:05AM (#15180522) Homepage Journal
      iKnewIt!

  • Wow! Baseless speculation! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22, 2006 @09:53AM (#15180465)
    Gosh... here's some more... Apple will eventually release a 16 gig ipod Nano! You heard it here first.

    Anyway, a 10 gig Nano makes no sense. 8? Sure, but 10? No. It can't be a single chip, and the size difference between it and an 8 gig isn't enough to justify the price difference for most people.

    • Re:Wow! Baseless speculation! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:11AM (#15180536) Homepage Journal
      I've seen product tear-downs that showed the current nano had two flash chips in the 4GB version, one in the 2GB version. Some might have two 1GB chips if it was more cost-effective. So an 8GB nano would have two two 4GB chips. Of course, bare flash chips are rated in bits, not bytes, so the chips might be 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb for the respective sizes.

      It might be more realistic to expect to see a 6GB version (1x 4GB and 1x 2GB chip) and the 4 and 2 GB models pushed down in price $50 each.

      • Re:Wow! Baseless speculation! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:47AM (#15180682) Homepage
        I'm too lazy to actually check out the sources, but wikipedia says it's 1x1GB, 2x1GB and 1x4GB respectively. Since there's 4GB chips already, and apparently room for two I imagine it's a matter of cost. An 8GB Nano would have a quite high price point.
      • I highly doubt they would split chip types like that. IIRC the 2 and 4 GB chips are slightly different in some respects... I heard someone ask about adding another 4GB chip to the open area on one of the boards once, dunno what came of that but I think the consensus was that it shouldn't work.

  • my prediction (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @09:54AM (#15180469)
    I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict that Apple will never increase the capacity of the Nano. Why would they do something as stupid as that?

  • Nanos were made to have smaller capacity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kestasjk ( 933987 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @09:54AM (#15180472) Homepage
    Nanos were made to have smaller capacity because Apple weren't selling a good balance of Minis and normal iPods, if they increase the storage capacity it gives people less incentive to buy a more expensive regular iPod.

    And does this really qualify as news?
    • Not if they bump the storage on the larger iPods as well.
      • Not if they bump the storage on the larger iPods as well.

        No, there's a break-even point. Even a 20GB iPod will play about music for about two weeks continuously, day and night before repeating. Every CD and vinyl record I've collected in the past 20 years will fit on a 40GB iPod, and that's close to AU$20,000 worth.

        I suspect everything I'd ever want to listen to would fit on a 100G iPod, and it would only take a 6 TB iPod to play music continuously for every waking hour of my life without repeats. I wouldn't want to buy anything bigger than that.

        • Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity (Score:5, Insightful)

          by radish ( 98371 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @11:41AM (#15180944) Homepage
          Right, but you forget two major factors.

          1) The fullsize ipods do video now. That needs a whole lot more space. The nano doesn't do video (does it?) and so the nano almost fits the "music only" category, which tops out around 20-40GB for most people. The HD based ipods then become more and more targetted at video customers.

          2) Lossless. I listen to my music at home via Squeezeboxes [slimdevices.com], and lots of people are starting to use HTPCs, Airport, etc to listen to the same rips at home as on the go. I know I sure as hell don't want to listen to AAC or MP3 on my nice hifi, so it's lossless all the way. Now I could (and in fact, do) keep two copies of everything - one for portable and one for home. But that's a pain to maintain. Would be easier if I didn't have to worry about space and could store all those huge files on a portable player too. My CD rips are currently around 200GB, and most of it is still lossy. When it's all reripped as lossless we'll be looking at over 0.5TB. Bring on the big portable players :)

          • Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity (Score:5, Insightful)

            by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @01:44PM (#15181495)
            1) The fullsize ipods do video now. That needs a whole lot more space.
            But will portable video ever take off enough for that to matter? It's not clear to me how many are buying the video iPod for the video. Even on the plane, it surprises me how few people I see watching movies on laptops, since it's about the only place I ever do so.
            • Well, for those of us laptop owners who don't want to have to buy a replacement battery, a new laptop every year, or business class tickets with power outlets, that doesn't always work that well. My 2-year and some old iBook holds a charge about 5 minutes when it's turned fully on (can sleep for at least a day, though, thankfully); I'd love to watch videos on a plane with that thing, but sad as it is it's just not possible any more. I'd love one of the new video-playing iPods. Going to ride the bus to Russi
          • When iTunes has decent (any) support for syncing your lossy version with your iPod and using the lossless for piping out of your media rig, let me know. Seeing that they're responsible for well over a billion sales of lossy audio tracks, I don't predict it coming anytime soon. Part of the problem is that I have no intention of paying over ten bucks for an album ever again, but I can't get CD-quality versions most of the time if I want to do so. There's always the option to get a flac version from allofmp
            • Don't use iTunes then - I don't. I never really could stand the user interface for it under Windows (I'm told it's better on a Mac by a friend who has a Mac).

              I use Anapod Explorer [redchairsoftware.com] by Red Chair Software. It allows me to keep my music collection in FLAC, and will transcode it to WAV or MP3 on the fly when I upload it to the iPod. Works great with my iPod Video.

              -- Joe
        • I totally agree with your sentiment but you maths seems a small bit off.

          128kbits per second is 16k per second.
          16k * 3600 seconds is 57600k/hr or 57.6 megs per hour.
          57.6 * 16 (waking) hours is 921 megs per day. Or about 0.9 gigs per day.
          365 days * .9 is 328 gigs per year.

          6 gigs divided by 0.328 gives just over 18 years.

          Now, I plan to live at least to 80 so maybe I'm in the market for a 15 terabyte iPod instead (note that I'm already 34). Young buyers that want lossless sound quality should be
          • I totally agree with your sentiment but you maths seems a small bit off.

            Assumptions rather than maths. I based the calc on a million hours, which is the traditional measure of an average working life (used for safety and mortality calculations). It doesn't take into account leisure hours.

            None the less, we're still within an order of magnitude of agreement, so I think the principle remains.

          • Not to nit pick, but...

            Assuming that your indeed from the land down under (based on the whois information on your site, which I checked just to be anal ;-) I'd like to point out that if your already 34, your life expectancy is going to be quite a bit less than 80 years, even if you are in in above average physical condition (though having good genes is obviously going to make a huge difference).

            I point this out as a lot of people take the current life expectancy figures for where ever they live to mean they

        • Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity (Score:5, Insightful)

          by plumby ( 179557 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @12:21PM (#15181129)
          There is a point at which it would become pointless, but 60GB aint it. I've got over 100GB of (legally aquired) mp3s in my library, and although there's a limit to the amount of music that I can listen to while I'm out, I don't know when I leave the house exactly which tracks I'm going to want to listen to - greater capacity means greater choice of music when I'm in the mood.
    • Yes, well one factor is the storage capacity, but let's not forget the size. At least for me, the smaller form factor of the Nano makes it much more attractive than the normal iPod and I don't think that I'm alone. These are really two distinct product lines with usually quite distinct user bases.

    • Re:Nanos were made to have smaller capacity (Score:4, Informative)

      by teslar ( 706653 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @12:00PM (#15181034)
      Nanos were made to have smaller capacity because Apple weren't selling a good balance of Minis and normal iPods.
      I'd say the capacity of the Nano has more to do with the flash memory than with any marketing goals. Flash memory is expensive and doesn't come in large-capacity flavours. Once it becomes cheaper and comes in higher capacities, you can bet that there will be higher-capacity Nanos out.
      if they increase the storage capacity it gives people less incentive to buy a more expensive regular iPod.
      Precisley. Which is why the regular iPods will be phased out, save perhaps for some large-screen video iPod. After all, why would I want a hard disk based mp3 player if I can have a solid state one with the same capacity for the same price? Hard disk players are going to die out, it's inevitable. Regular iPods won't be an exception.
    • Has flash memory become cheap enough for 8-10gb nano's to be out with a nice profit margin?
    • And if they go to intel that will give people less incentive to buy their PPC stock. I know this isn't 100% the same, but it does say a little about the comapny.

      While I don't believe that Apple will totally disregard the costs of their actions, I do think that they will move in the right direction, even if they do bare a slight cost. Besides, they are competing against other players (kinda), so they do have a little incentive to kill off the older stuff while introducing new products. What generation iPo
    • "if they increase the storage capacity it gives people less incentive to buy a more expensive regular iPod."

      This is probably why the other iPods support video, now. In any event, yes there's less incentive to buy the more expensive regular ipod, but there's also more incentive to those (like me) who don't want to pay $300+ for that iPod. I actually never seriously considered buying an iPod until the Nano came out. $200ish price tag + really small + adequate storage == MobileTatsu friendly. (I only reall
    • Okay, no, that's silly to even ponder. Apple will eventually switch over from HD-based supercapacity players to flash-based. Both harddrive and flash players are increasing in size. There is a large market for reasonably-priced, extremely small music players and HD-based players don't fit that bill. Any increase in size will only make the market more willing to purchase from Apple and if that means some cannabilization of the HD lineup, so be it. Apple can shift their production priorities to match mar
    • The nanos were made with smaller capacity because those 2GB flash chips were what was available at the time. The chips are already expensive as it is, and the 4GB nano is using two of them. It has nothing to do with "balance." Apple just loves to sell iPods, and if the minis and nanos outsell the bigger versions, they're fine with that since it's more money for them. Steve Jobs predicted the nano would be the biggest selling iPod ever, so they know what models appeal to consumers.
    • Not sure if this has been mentioned, but space on both iPods would steadily increase.

      The ability to play video also give them the bigger iPods some marketplace. Currently you can even hook your video iPod into a TV with a regular camcorder cable that splits into composite red, white, and yellow. If the iPod Nano does one day support video, it still has the disadvantage of having a smaller screensize.

      Music data might not explode, but imagine the iPod having the capabilities of playing hdtv quality back on yo

  • Larger Nano (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ryz0r ( 849412 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @09:58AM (#15180497)
    >>Apple will release larger iPod Nanos in the near future

    I hear it's going to be called the iPodx10^-8

  • Do 8 & 10 gig flash media drives even exist at this time (or in the near future)?

  • Just 10GB? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:19AM (#15180564)
    10GB? Lame, that's barely enough for my Frank Zappa MP3s.

    And what about wireless?

  • Here is Why... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:27AM (#15180603)
    You can get a 4GB USB thumb drive for $100 [meritline.com] (or get four 512MB and one 2GB bundled together [dealmac.com] for $108). The current crop of MicroDrives (CompactFlash-compatible miniature hard drives [buy.com]) of similar capacity runs even less.

    If a normal consumer can buy these things on the retail market today, Apple really needs to get its act together and start increasing capacity on its lower end or it is going to lose that market to these cheap drives and the simple add-ons that allow playback of music.
    • Oh right, consumers don't care about looks, build quality, ease of use, or convenience any more? Storage density or price is all that matters now, right?

      As a business Apple needs to maintain profitability. I'm sure they'll refresh to 6gb and 10gb later this year, but if they do it too early then the cost vs price is too high and if they do it too late then the sales interest will drop.
    • Apple has never competed on price. The basic iPod is still the most expensive MP3 player by about 30%. And for the cost of a 4GB nano, you can get a 20GB HDD based MP3 player. Heck, you can get a 20 GB Archos Jukebox for 100 dollars [dealtree.net] if you look.

      Where Apple shines is form factor. That Archos Jukebox can be amazingly cheap, but it won't fit in your pocket. The iRiver [iriver.com] is a powerful, fully featured player, but just try to get it to do anything without taking a course at your technical school. Even the reg

  • More Music (Score:5, Funny)

    by Metabolife ( 961249 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:41AM (#15180658)
    Great, a 10GB would let you have 2,500 songs (according to apple's rating), this is great business for apple. Now instead of just getting 1,000 dollars from people to fill it, they can bump it up to 2,500 dollars! Brilliant!
    • Great, a 10GB would let you have 2,500 songs

      If it was Sony's rating then that would be 5000 ;) I still can't work out how sony is selling any media players at all.

  • Difference between rumor and speculation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heli_flyer ( 614850 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:48AM (#15180688)
    There's a difference between rumor and speculation, and this is more speculation than rumor.

  • nano replaced mini (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @10:48AM (#15180689) Homepage Journal
    The nanos were clearly created to replace the minis, which were cute but had limited battery life due to the power requirements of the hard drives, and as they were so small could not have larger batteries.

    As the minis were phased out, they had a capacity of 6 gig. I have been expecting the nano to increase to 8 gig for a while. Of course the nano still has a short battery life, and perhpas the added memeory is just going to make that worse.

    The 4GB are available, and given Apple discounts are not overly expensive. I do not see a 10 gig nano, as the nanos seem to have pairs of cards. Hopefully they will come out with a 8 gig Nano in the $250 price range, and drop the other prices according. That might be enough space to make it worthwhile. I would also like to see a 2gig shuffle, though that product line also seems to be dead.

    • Re:nano replaced mini (Score:3, Informative)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 )
      Modded 5 insightful? The battery life on the 2G minis was very good, around 15-18hrs (more than the full iPods at the time IIRC). The nano's battery life seems a little shorter, around 10-14hrs.

  • why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by penguin-collective ( 932038 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @11:00AM (#15180740)
    I don't see the point. If you're gonna dock to your computer, then you only need memory for one battery charge, and 2G is plenty. If you're going to use a charger while traveling, 10G strikes me as too small for a regular music collection.

    I bought the 4G but discovered through use that I could have saved my money and lived just fine with the 1G or 2G model.
    • I don't regularly listen to about 70% of what's on my iRiver. Nevertheless, it's useful to have it there since I do use it occasionally - and especially since I use it to play music through the mixing desk during intervals at the gigs I help run.

      The music you have on there at the start of the day might not be what you fancy listening to at the end of the day. And most people don't want to keep moving music backwards and forwards every time their immediate taste changes slightly - they want it all available.

    • Re:why? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by matt21811 ( 830841 ) * on Saturday April 22, 2006 @12:29PM (#15181169) Homepage
      "10G strikes me as too small for a regular music collection."

      Actually, 10 gig is almost exactly the size of average music collection when stored in 128kbit compressed format. This BBC article shows that men own, on average, 178 albums (women, on average, own less).
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/410 2786.stm [bbc.co.uk]

      178 (albums) * 650MB (maximum data per album) * 128 Kb/sec (good quality compression rate) / 1411.2 Kb (per sec data rate e on the CD) = 10493.5 MB. This is over just 10 GB to store the average mans music collection.
      • And how many albums does the average man download on P2P programs? ;)

        In fact, it might be an interesting question since the people using P2P programs are still not so many (relatively speaking, of course).
      • To be nitpicky:

        A: A 10 GB drive will not store 10 GB worth of stuff. After formatting and other inevibible marketing losses, you're really looking at about 8 GB.

        B: Always rip at least at 160k for MP3's. 128 is OK if you're talking about OGG, but Nanos don't play OGG.

  • Well, I'm convinced (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tim Browse ( 9263 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @11:08AM (#15180779)
    Granted it's an almost completely unsubstantiated prediction from somebody outside of Apple, but it is what a lot of people have been asking for since the original Nanos came out.

    There are rumours that God exists. Granted it's an almost completely unsubstantiated prediction from somebody outside of Heaven, but it is what a lot of people have been wanting since the original Homo Sapiens came out.

  • It has been done already (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kryptonian Jor-El ( 970056 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @11:11AM (#15180797)
    Hackaday.com recently had an article about converting a 4 GB iPod nano to an 8 GB. Apparently apple only uses 1 flash chip in the Nano to make up the entire 4 GBs, but in fact it has a second spot on the board to attach a second 4 GB flash chip. It wouold be pretty cool to have an 8 GB iPod Nano though. http://ipod.hackaday.com/entry/1234000233073484/ [hackaday.com]
    • I saw the original article [multiarcade.com] a while ago.

      What I hadn't known is that the people at hackaday said that: "The legitimacy of this hack is yet to be confirmed.

      It'd be cool if it was true, but the firmware might not be able to handle the extra space.

  • 8Gigs? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22, 2006 @11:20AM (#15180836)
    640k should be enough for anybody.
  • So can we now expect prices on the smaller ones to finally fall to reasonable levels? That's all that's prevented me from buying one, actually.

  • My iPod (Score:3, Funny)

    by EZLeeAmused ( 869996 ) on Saturday April 22, 2006 @12:10PM (#15181079)
    is going to have 11GB
  • although it looks cool and easy to use, the battery nightmare was enough for me to ditch it. Not to mention you cant pull the mp3s back off it, or use it with anything but itunes-shamola.
  • I know the screen it's small but believe me, it has enough resolution to play videos. I have a Rockbox on my nano and Doom really looks great, even better that the GBA version. Also the included 3d screensavers like "plasma" and "fire" are neat.
    I wish Apple includes video support in an upcoming software upgrade.

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