6G iPod & Apple's Future 226
belsin_gordon writes "CNET rounds up what we're going to get from the next iPod and where Apple is heading as a company and as a business juggernaut. [They have the] 100GB widescreen video iPods, Wi-Fi-enabled iPods capable of on-the-fly movie downloads over the air, unlimited downloads from iTunes for a flat fee and the UK finally getting its content-hungry hands on movie downloads.
Apple has dropped the 'Computer' from its company name, and is making significant advances into the media-distribution business. It's bringing video to everyone everywhere with iTunes movies and now Apple TV, and the rumours and speculation we've discussed promote the theory that Apple is setting itself up as a major player in the media-distribution industry."
Re:But who buys Apple computers ? (Score:0, Informative)
Before you say get a Mac Mini, please re-read the "expandable" part. I don't want to have my desk covered with external hard drives and cd drives.
Re:Unlimited? (Score:2, Informative)
6 Gig? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Portable Video (Score:5, Informative)
Player - Weight - Size
Arch704 - 22oz - 7"x5"x0.8"
iPhone - 4.8oz - 4.5"x2.5"x0.5".
The primary drawback of archos players has always been size and weight - which also happens to be the primary requirement for these devices. if it does not satisfy this preliminary constraint, it does not matter what amazing features the archos provides.
Re:Why (Score:4, Informative)
It does not [apple.com]. Every ipod can be used in disk mode, should you so choose.
Re:Music subscriptions (Score:3, Informative)
No. Jobs has pretty much ruled out that option. Apple wants no DRM on music, and they will not license FairPlay.
Re:Why (Score:5, Informative)
In the ``drag and drop'' model, the device has to build that database itself, presumably by reading the ID3 tags. That's a nightmare. To build it incrementally is incredibly hard. To build it from scratch every time involves reading the tags out of potentially tens of thousands of files, grinding it into a database of some sort and writing it to disk. On a ~100MHz low-power CPU with a small amount of RAM, out of either flash or a slow microdisk. That'll take forever. And the moment you say ``ah, but there's this application you can run on the host computer'' then you're back essentially with the iTunes model. And that's before we consider the living hell that is parsing ID3 tags consistently, writing to FAT32 filesystems safely and all the rest of the tasks an iPod doesn't have to do.
ian
Re:Ipod wifi... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But who buys Apple computers ? (Score:5, Informative)
They can play back MPEG-2,
Archos is the real mp3 player pioneer, they paved the way for large hard drive mp3 players with their Jukebox Multimedia. If you want any of the features mentioned in this article, you don't have to wait for the next iPod, because Archos has had them for a while now.
Re:Why (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I have, in fact. I regularly transfer music to my iPod from Amarok [kde.org], and it works flawlessly. Next question!