The Guts Of An iPod 313
The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at
this Japanese web site
have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is
here. The FireWire contoller appears to be
TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B
w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."
Re:Reverse Engineering? (Score:2, Interesting)
First Airport, now this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Lucent 802.11b cards, AMD based base stations, and not Portal designed mp3 player and UI by Pixo.
Now if they can only work together with AMD and NVIDIA to introduce a new low cost entry level Mac ($500 range) and use DAISY type runtime optimzation and recompilation in the OS to make it hardware agnostic...
ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't seems like a bad deal after all (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:First Airport, now this... (Score:2, Interesting)
According to my anonymous source at PortalPlayer, it's based on Lineo's RXTC [lineo.com] microkernel. Of course, the ``application'' side has been hacked on quite a bit and has had significant additions to the database and filesystem added, but it's still RXTC based.
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it. (Score:2, Interesting)
solid-state memory.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PortalPlayer (Score:4, Interesting)
I was in an SDMI meeting when that is precisely what was proposed. The drop dead codes would be encoded into CDs. The first time that the MP3 player saw the drop dead code it would set a switch so that it would only accept SDMI encoded MP3 files.
That was the first and last meeting with those loonies that I attended. The basic idea that they had was that I would spend several million dollars building security technology for them and they would pay me $0.10 per player until the royalties reached a certain point when they would buy my interest out completely for about $100K.
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Clearly, in light of this, they haven't designed iPod to fatten their wallets. There's more than meets the eye here.
The hard drive alone, when bought by the end-consumer, retails for $399.
Personally, I've already ordered my iPod and I can't wait to get it!
The underlying theme (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone actually see people going from the Wintel environment to Mac? How about the other way around? It seems to me that Mac's market share has been pretty stagnant for awhile, and I just don't see anything changing it as this point.
This seems to be Apple trying to solidify their own market, and push out into a currently unexplored market. But even if a few Wintel users drop the $400 for the device, I seriously doubt that many are going to buy a Mac to go with it. I still see both machines at targeted at different markets, different consumers.
Face it, both Apple and Wintel are good at what they do. I sometimes think that the perception that there is a market for "converting" people between these two platforms is ludicrous. I don't think Apple thinks they can convert people to Mac with this device because I don't think that market really exists in any significant number.
Especially when you see the bitterness between the two camps.
Software guts (Score:4, Interesting)
If Windows could read HFS+ hard drives with firewire without the 3rd party software, you could just plug it in and upload whatever you wanted.
All the music files are in an invisible folder at the root level of the drive. Very easy to copy. I don't know about adding files that way, there may be a playlist that needs to be updated as well...
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah but. . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Ha! Cracking CSS can get you arrested in Europe. Still think you are safe from our corporate sponsored legal system?
As with most things (not all, but most), Europe is on the same track as the US, just a few years behind. Sit tight friend, we will bring opression to you!
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it. (Score:1, Interesting)
The PC issue is hardly a big deal, Apple IPOD is going to start supporting the PC in late november, supposedly with MusicMatch as the required PC side app.
Evidently the software that PortalPlayer provides with its product is too lame for Apple to use.
Re:It's great to have sites like this (Score:1, Interesting)