60GB iPod Coming? 563
An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba today announced that it will offer a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch hard drive in the coming months and that Apple has already placed its order. Cindy Lee, deputy manager of Toshiba's hard disk drive division, said the drive will enter mass production during July or August. All three iPod models (15GB, 20GB, and 40GB) use Toshiba drives, while the iPod mini uses a 4GB 1-inch drive from Hitachi. Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000 of the 1.8-inch drives per month to Apple."
Enough is Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Minis.. (Score:2, Interesting)
July or August, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
60GB on the go??? (Score:1, Interesting)
I usually tend to think the player's storage capacity in relation to how much music I would be needing before having a chance to load other music to the player thingy. 60gb?? 4gb Creative Muvo sounds about right in that sense.
60GB... but anything else? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does Apple have any plans to beef up their offerings, or are they counting on consumers to keep paying for the iPod's hipster image?
They get a better deal than we do... (Score:5, Interesting)
But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.
Re:Enough is Enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.
Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.
Woohoo! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be really psyched when 80 GBs are available, and then (dream dream) it'll take a 160 GB iPod to make me really, really happy.
This might not seem like a big deal, but when I'm travelling, especially when I'm flying my Cherokee 180-D across country, I won't be able to anticipate what I'll really want to listen to - and I invariably want to hear something that I didn't bring along.
And if you think iPods are expensive, you should price avionics on an airplane. Or really just about anything on an airplane.
Re:Enough is Enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Drives? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pricing (Score:5, Interesting)
Portable HD durability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.
Re:Somebody's gonna buy it... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not the fastest firewire drive on the turnpike, but it rocks in terms of dual-use. Came in quite handy when I wanted to repartition and put Yellow Dog Linux alongside OS X on my Powerbook.
How long is the iPod thing going to last? (Score:3, Interesting)
The iPod is a different thing. It's just a music player with some storage and a cool look. It's the kind of thing that can be designed fairly easily. It requires the iTunes service, but that's also something which any company can set up for not too much money. I guess it gives Apple some "cred" but it also sets Apple up to be priced out of the market when iPod-like things become commodities. Just wondering... Do any iPod users have thoughts on this?
---------
WML porn [steamymobile.com] - you must have a WML-capable browser like Opera to click that link
Audio books (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too much space! (Score:5, Interesting)
Peace
Gyroscopic effect (Score:2, Interesting)
Who the hell has 60 GB of (legally acquired)
Affordable harddrive sub $100 MP3 players ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pricing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Somebody's gonna buy it... (Score:3, Interesting)
It wouldn't surprise me if we see the same thing with higher capacity mini-HDs. Apple's surely willing to pay some premium to be the only ones who can ship a 60G mp3 player.
Re:Use for 60GB HD (Score:3, Interesting)
You should be able to do better than that. A cd is 1411(?) kbps. Apple Lossless comes in at about half that so really we're talking 3x as much space max.
Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving. It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.
Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.
In the Year 2012 . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They get a better deal than we do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, actually it looks like it was just a matter of Creative Labs eating the extra cost of the CF drives to get the units out the door on-time.
Almost immediately, the CF card disappeared, and it was replaced with an identical-looking hard drive with only an IDE interface (not really a CF card).
If you've got an example of any other MP3 players selling for less than the cost of the drive alone, I'll eat my words...
Re:Arrest Upon Purchase (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too much space! (Score:4, Interesting)
Mo cap is better always.
Re:Too much space! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Apple will also join the video bandwagon as they step up to the bigger drives?
Re:iPod and UFS (Score:3, Interesting)
No, in fact it's well-known that the iPod is using HFS+. It was a big issue when the iPod first came out, because Linux users were hoping to use it, and Linux has HFS support (but not HFS+).
As for the Windows version of the iPod, I would imagine it's using FAT32, but I don't know that. I find it highly unlikely that Apple would write a UFS filesystem driver for Windows, just for their iPod.
Personally, I would much prefer if they DID use UFS, since UFS is found on every major OS, except Windows. It would be nice to see a Windows UFS driver, so people's external hard drives would not be limited to slow, nasty, fragmenting, wasteful FAT32.
Everyone else has already said that UFS is the BSD-licensed Unix Filesystem, so I'll just skip that part...
Re:60GB... but anything else? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the iPod works with Audible.com. The iRiver does not.
Reinforces the video-capable iPod rumours (Score:3, Interesting)
People asking who could possibly need 60GB for music storage (by the way, I can't fit all my music library on my 40GB model) are possibly missing the point of the need for greater storage capacity.
Sure, 60GB is a lot of 6MB music files, but it it's a whole lot fewer movie files.
Personally, I think a fully multimedia iPod would no longer be an iPod, but I'm sure that Apple would find it hard not to capitalise on its mega-brand if the potential market for such devices ever became widespread enough.
Re:Enough is Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Backup purposes? Why backup onto an iPod? Hell, I don't see why you wouldn't install all the tools you need to work and carry your office around in your pocket, ready to go at home, at the office, or wherever you find a Mac. In short, the iPod gives you a lot of the portability of a laptop in a much more portable form factor.
The fact that it's a great music player too is almost a fringe benefit.
Yes, there are other small FireWire drives on the market, such as the FireLite drives. They're cheaper than an iPod, but they're larger, not as comfortable in the pocket, and they're lousy music players.
Re:Enough is Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily. It has been suggested that the genes responsible for autoimmunity also serve to protect the body against some forms of cancer, in that they make the immune system more likely to attack cells which look slightly abnormal.
If this hypothesis is correct -- to my knowledge there hasn't been any direct evidence in either direction -- then autoimmunity might be a positive genetic trait, since it's much easier to replace a few hormones (insulin, thyroxine, etc.) than it is to detect and eliminate cancer.
Going the other way... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Players with 60Gb drives have been out for a wh (Score:2, Interesting)
Lossless is a waste of space on iPods (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.
Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.
The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...
Extra features (Score:2, Interesting)
firstly, a sandisk memory block that clips into the back. It would double as the stream buffer and also an easy way to transfer large amounts of music from one pod to another instintaniously. This one would be for those people who "jack in" to each others ipods at crosswalks and stuff. Imagine swaping tastes in music simply by switching memory blocks with someonelse. (not completly legal, but admitily something i would enjoy experiencing).
Secondly, a SuperVideo out with Divx Decoding, using a upgradable decoding chip/module.
-- Grimace1975
Re:You mean? (Score:2, Interesting)
"You mean I have to trade in my Creative Zen Xtra 60gb and pay so much more for a basically equivilant device?" (pros and cons exist for both, but, I'd say low cost is a major pro-side)
Hehe.. Actually, I did just get one for a b-day present. They are good overall, I'd rate it as about a 8/10 or so, only because of a few firmware quirks that could be nicer, and the case is designed poorly. (I.e. no window, and strap covers the port you need to charge it.)
But, for far less $ than the Trendy(TM) equivilant, you can have a device which performs the same if not better, has a user-replacable battery, and looks sexy to boot.
Link to the Zen Xtra [creative.com]
Re:You mean? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.
On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.
Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.
On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.
Re:Minis.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully a 60GB iPod will drive the price of the iPod Mini down. At the moment it really doesn't measure up to your standard iPod in terms value for money.
It sells very well, so some would consider it good value already...
Re:Portable HD durability? (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I have a flash based player. It is smaller than my headphones, doubles as a USB key, and holds 512 MB. Now all I need is a program that will automatically put fresh MP3s on it when I plug it in to my computer.
Re:They get a better deal than we do... (Score:1, Interesting)
WRONG! The iPod Mini and the Creative player both use the same Hitachi drive. The drive can be set in one of three modes by the manufacturer: CF, CF/IDE, and IDE. The iPod Mini came off the assembly line in pure IDE mode only, whereas the Creative player shipped initially in CF/IDE mode, which allowed it to be used in digital cameras in CF mode. Then they got smart and fixed the drive to operate in IDE mode only, so newer Creative players will not work in digicams.
Re:Too much space! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ground Loop Hum (Score:3, Interesting)
sound isolating headphones block out background noise eliminating the need to crank the volume. After using these headphones I found it unnecessary to turn it up so loud, an in fact found it annoying to do so as the pain in the ears isn't that fun.
The link is only to show the phones. They are a rip off at 179. I got mine for $135 US.