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Portables (Apple) Businesses Apple Hardware

Anandtech Dissects The New iPod 50

Posted by timothy from the attention-to-detail dept.
oDDmON oUT writes "Anandtech dissects the new version of Apple's iPod in this review. Everything is given a thorough going over, complete with photos. While not revelatory, consider this the must-have addition to the manual."
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Anandtech Dissects The New iPod More

Anandtech Dissects The New iPod

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  • Cradle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Traderdot ( 677425 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:30AM (#6159719) Homepage
    The best thing about the redesigned iPod is the cradle instead of plugging in a firewire cable. This is a more consumer friendly idea, like the cradle for Kodak digital cameras.

    • Re:Cradle (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mark Hood ( 1630 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:44AM (#6159792) Homepage
      It's worth noting that the firewire cable plugs into the dock, and then the iPod sits in the dock.

      If you prefer, you can forget the dock, and just plug the cable right into the bottom of the iPod - the connector's the same. The only addition in the dock is a line-out port.

      Plus you get a power adaptor which simply turns the local power plug into a firewire socket... so you can power the dock or the iPod while you're away from your Mac, whichever you prefer. I might get a spare dock for work, even though I can't plug it into my PC, just to let my iPod stand on the desk rather than lying there all forlorn...

      All in all, it's a very sensible design - I know a lot of companies that'd have the power adaptor built into the dock & require a firewire and power connection to use it, and three different cable connectors :)

      Mark

    • Re:Cradle (Score:4, Insightful)

      by capmilk ( 604826 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @08:02AM (#6159880)
      I'd rather say the cradle is a bad thing. All I needed to hook up my 5 GB iPod at work was a cheap Firewire cable.

      Not sure if you can buy separate cradles (and matching cables), but I'd bet they are not cheap.

  • not just yet (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ionyka ( 584937 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:47AM (#6159805) Homepage
    I got a second gen iPod for this past Christmas, and though its not the new line, im still really happy with it (10g). The new ones have some really nice features, like the backlight buttons, a thinner overall casing, the dock which is a very nice addition to its accessories. But, its still not enough for me to trade mine in. These are the firsts of a basically brand new line, and firsts always come with problems. I think it will take another release or two for me to trade mine in.

    • Re:not just yet (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dylan Zimmerman ( 607218 ) <Bob_Zimmerman@NoSpaM.myrealbox.com> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @12:27PM (#6162488)
      Well, with the second generation iPods, you don't NEED backlit buttons.

      I find all of the buttons on my iPod by feel alone. I probably wouldn't be able to use the new one nearly as effectively as I can use my Gen 2. Just yesterday, I was navigating my playlists in my pocket. I doubt that the new iPods have buttons that I could even feel through my pocket, let alone reliably press.

      In my opinnion, the dock is just another port to clog with dirt. I haven't seen a new iPod in person yet, but if the dock port doesn't have a cover of some sort, I would expect it to fill with dirt rather quickly.
      • I doubt that the new iPods have buttons that I could even feel through my pocket, let alone reliably press.

        I got my new iPod at the weekend, and am already using the scroll wheel and buttons through my pockets to control my music and change the volume.

        Each button is in an individual depression, as is the scroll wheel, making them easy to find, and they respond well enough to presses through the material of my trousers.
        • OK. As long as they aren't flush with the surface, they should be much more useable. The pictures that I had seen of it seemed to indicate a totally flat face, and that would make it awfully hard to actually use the thing.

  • ipoding.com did it first. (Score:5, Informative)

    by nilepoc ( 7329 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:52AM (#6159832) Homepage Journal
    For more photos, see
    http://www.ipoding.com/
    and look under the new ipod section. They have also taken apart the dock, and figured out where the line in and out are, as well as the USB 2.0, and Firewire leads in then plug.

    Also thier photos are labled and show case details that are not covered in this review.

  • They insist that the price of the USB 2.0 cable is $40 - bull - it is $20 - no fact checking - if a basic fact like this is wrong, what else is wrong?

    Gil

  • Very PC-Centric Review (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mark Hood ( 1630 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @09:03AM (#6160409) Homepage
    Which is fine, but they say 'you can't sync Contacts, Calendars or Notes automatically' without commenting that you can using OS X.

    iSync'll take care of the first two (and very well). You can do notes manually, or there's a lot of OS X apps which'll do it for you - Pod2Go [kainjow.com] is a good one, which scrapes news, weather etc off the web and slaps it into notes. There are others [macupdate.com], but there's also a new Interactive Fiction [ipodding.com] thing under development, so the opportunities are endless.

    I'm quite sure some enterprising PC developer will code up something similar, if they haven't already, but for once it's nice to be ahead of the crowd as a Mac User :)

    Mark
    • Apple doesn't advertise this, but there is about a 5k file size limit for notes.

      I was hoping to put the Apache manual in there, but it won't fit.

      Well, maybe in the next firmware update...

  • surprisingly... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gizzmonic ( 412910 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @10:10AM (#6161058) Homepage Journal
    Anandtech makes no mention of how many frames per second that the iPod scores in Quake III. They are running the risk of alienating their core audience!

  • Weak article. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ubikkibu ( 544498 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @10:39AM (#6161355)
    Anand clearly has never touched a Mac, nor wants to. So he's missing out on the simple beauty of iTunes 4 and an iPod. If the article had been titled "iPod for Windows users," it would have made more sense.

    And what's with the swapped picture captions: "new unit on right, old on left." Match it to the picture.

    And I'll be damned if Arkanoid was the "original arcade version" of Wozniak's Breakout. Children need to research a bit more.
    • Don't you mean Job's Breakout? ;)
      • > Don't you mean Job's Breakout?

        No, unless I miss your joke.

        Wozniak reportedly took Atari's Breakout to the Apple ][. See:
        http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/WOZNIAK.HTM

        "Wozniak said that a lot of reasons that made the Apple II standout where due to a game, Breakout, which he had designed in hardware form for Atari. He had wanted to program Breakout in software. Since Wozniak had written the Basic interpreter, a program that translates the instruction to machine language, he was easily able to. When he got
      • Don't you mean Job's Breakout? ;)

        The sad part is, Jobs made $7000 from Atari for bringing Breakout to completion, and he gave the Woz $350 (who did ALL the work). I think it was his first little back-stabbing move, I'm still not sure when Woz found out about this.
    • Is there really a need for the title of the article to include "Windows users" when the audience to his website are infact, windows users?
      • When you're talking about a product as Mac-centric as the iPod, yes. You can't make unqualified complaints about missing features if the only reason those features are "missing" is that you're using a different platform from the one the product is really intended for. That would be like complaining that MS Word won't launch, and failing to mention that you're using Linux.
    • Wozniak did not design Atari's "Breakout." In the lab, "Breakout" had too many chips which would've made it expensive to produce. Nolan Bushnell gave Steve Jobs the task of reducing as many chips needed as possible, and Jobs received a $1000 bonus for every chip eliminated. Jobs turned around and hired Woz to reduce the chips for him at a fraction of the cost and the lure of playing "Night Driver" for free at night. Arkanoid did rip off "Breakout"/"Super Breakout", but they did not rip off Woz...
  • I like all the old/new comparisons....just they seem a bit silly. Eg: the headphones, the "new" ones also came with the v1.5 iPods (as i call em, the slighly slimmed and increased size versions). Also the processor is the same one just a newer revision...

    Another is the software review, how about EphPod? a free Windows iPod manager? seems a little restricted view on the iPod imho... possibly this review was wrote not by a avid user of one but someone who just managed to get his hands on 2 spare iPods...
    • The touch-wheel iPods are the second generation.

      The second gen iPods came with

      - the iPod unit
      - a set of second gen earbud headphones
      - two sets of grey covers for the earbuds
      - the wired remote control*
      - a 6-pin to 4-pin Firewire adapter
      - an AC adapter
      - a 2 meter 6-pin to 6-pin Firewire cable
      - a cloth carrying case*
      - a rigid carrying case*
      - a CD containing MusicMatch Jukebox and various other iPod related software

      The * denotes items that only come with the 10/20GB units.

      I really like EphPod. It's much be

  • You must be kidding (Score:5, Informative)

    by soramimicake ( 593421 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @11:13AM (#6161641)
    The new firmware also comes with a couple of new games; back from the original iPod is breakout (called "Brick" for some reason), which is a toned down version of the arcade original - Arkanoid.
    Arkanoid the original? Atari's Breakout predates Arkanoid by years. And that Atari game have, shall we say, some ties [gamespy.com] with the company that brings you the iPod.

    BTW, there was a version of it on the Apple ][ as well.

  • Lack of x86 support a disadvantage? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by coolgeek ( 140561 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @01:35PM (#6163244) Homepage
    To quote the article: Unfortunately, the biggest limitation for Apple's computers continues to be the lack of x86 support, thus preventing all of this stylish hardware from being used on over two decades of the largest software user base.

    Gee, I thought that was *the* most fortunate advantage of the Mac platform.

    • Re:sig (Score:2)

      by Triv ( 181010 ) *
      RE: your sig - To be fair, apart from Prescott Bush's pseudo-involvement in German industry, he was also the only member of Congress to stand up to Joe McCarthy's HUAC proposal. Not saying he was an angel but he doesn't sound like much of a Nazi sympathiser either.

      I also couldn't find any...reputable...sources to back you up. No established newspapers, no college publications or anything close. Certainly not anything cited or researched.

      I did, however, find articles that refute you, like this [straightdope.com] one. Unl

  • Some users reporting problems (Score:4, Informative)

    by Van Halen ( 31671 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @01:53PM (#6163427) Journal
    I've had my 30 GB iPod for a little over 2 weeks now, and I absolutely love it. Finally I have access to my entire CD collection (over 320 CDs) wherever and whenever I want! But that said, it's not without its problems. This thread [apple.com] at Apple's discussion boards seems to hit most of them. The only ones I've had personally are the clicking between tracks and channel swapping when seeking through a track. Not nearly as bad as what some people have experienced, but it can be annoying.

    ThinkSecret [thinksecret.com] keeps predicting an iPod firmware update but apparently it keeps getting pushed back. Perhaps Apple is having a lot of problems with this one. When it does finally come out, hopefully it'll not only add the USB 2.0 support, but fix most of these issues.

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