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Media (Apple) Businesses Media Apple

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."
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60GB iPod Coming?

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  • You mean? (Score:4, Funny)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:36PM (#9322444)
    I have to upgrade my 40g ipod already!?!

    Im only hovering on 5g of songs!
  • Enough is Enough (Score:3, Interesting)

    by moberry ( 756963 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:36PM (#9322449)
    I have almost 10 GB of music on my pc. I only listen to about 50 of them on a regualr basis. Does anyone really need 60 GB of music. Yes it can be used for backup purposes. But dedicated backup external hard drives at a higher storage capacity are cheaper than this.
    • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:38PM (#9322465)
      I'm in the process of "reripping" my entire CD collection at the moment. I've got the extra space, so why should I be listening to 128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999?
    • by Garrett Combs ( 699749 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:40PM (#9322471) Homepage
      Also, an external backup solution doesn't make your stomach sink when you get a ding or scratch on the casing.

      I hate scratches. :(
    • Re:Enough is Enough (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:43PM (#9322492) Homepage Journal
      So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.

      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.
      • by mog007 ( 677810 )
        I disagree. Through the millenia that humans have been around the diagnosis and treatment for diabetes is fairly new. From a biological stand point when you get something like diabetes, it's time for you to check out and no longer contribute to the gene pool, but we've evolved to make it so that isn't a problem.

        Music on the other hand, has been around longer than medicine. It could be considered entertainment, but it's a very important facet of human life. Almost everyone listens to music in one form o
    • by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:43PM (#9322493) Homepage
      Let me be the first to say "40GB is enough for anyone".

      So maybe the 60GB drive is for the mythical video iPod. (Not.)
    • Re:Enough is Enough (Score:5, Interesting)

      by niko9 ( 315647 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:44PM (#9322500)
      Do you listen to 3:05 minute pop songs? I don't. I have a alllot of classical music I would love to take with me. They take up alot of space.
      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:54AM (#9322838)
        Look folks, it's simple enough. "Alot" is NOT A WORD. You mean "a lot". That's TWO WORDS. Repeat after me - "alot" is not a word, it is a lazy mistake. "allllllllot" is not a word, it is a symptom of really believing, wrongly, that "alot" is a word and proceeding to spell it without using the space bar.

        Can we at least try to spell things the right way? Let's have some coherent discourse, and leave the typos at home.
        • loose is the opposite of "tight". It is not the same word as "lose".
        • lose is the opposite of "win". It is not the same word as "loose".
        • alot is not a word. You either meant "a lot" (many of) or "allot" (allocate).
        • embiggen is not a word, not even a perfectly cromulent word. Homer Simpson made it up.
        • irregardless is not a word, it's an word that idiots use because they think it makes them look clever. "regardless" would be fine. "irrespective" would be fine. But no, you have to show the world what an idiot you are.
        • virii is not a word. It is not slang. It is not jargon. It is WRONG. It is wrong in every possible way. It's not English, it's not Latin, it's not understood by anybody with an education, it's not understood by anyone except people who already know it's wrong. It is not going to be adopted any time soon. Stop using it.

        Show the world you care about good communication. Fucking learn to communicate coherently. Classical music my fucking arse, you can't even spell.
        • by brodin ( 200847 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @02:50AM (#9323271)
          Jeez, what a looser. Irregardless of this I noticed that Windows embiggens all the virii on my boxen.
        • by vomission ( 785188 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @03:56AM (#9323522)

          In spite of your errant pedantry, some of your points are plainly wrong.

          irregadless is most definitely a word. The OED, Webster's, and the American Heritage Dictionary all contain it as a listed item. (While all "words" are not necessarily listed, all listed items are necessarily words.) It's got nearly a century of documented history. Its usage may be discouraged, but it is nevertheless a word.

          virii actually IS a word, however sad this fact may be. Its use is restricted to very specific groups, which qualifies it as part of a specific linguistic register (sort of like a dialect within a social subgroup of a population). So, "virii" is the plural of "virus" in and only in the context of computer viruses being discussed by the sorts of people who think writing them is a good way to spend an afternoon and their ilk. (You may find the discussion of plurals of virus in English & Latin to be found here [linguistlist.org] of some interest. But these facts about what ought to be the correct plural according to English & Latin morphological rules do not discount the fact that "virii" entered one register of the English language via a route that "smacks of pseudo-pedantry.")

          And, saddest of all, though this day has not yet come, alot will one day be a grammatical word in the English langauge. Words like "altogether", "instead", "nonetheless", "amiss", "already", and "alright" (the last of which is still in the process of gaining acceptance), all attest to the process by which words that frequently collocate coalesce into new words. Thankfully, we'll probably all be dead before "alot" becomes kosher in formal writing.

    • by Wrexen ( 151642 )
      A not-unreasonable collection of CDs compressed with FLAC would be pressing the limits of a 60 Gb drive. When you consider lossless audio (or near-lossless like high-kbps mp3/aac), the large drive sizes are quite reasonable. If you only listen to 128kbps pop singles, fine by me, but don't go around raining on other people's parades. If you don't need it, don't buy it, and market pressures will adjust production accordingly
    • by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:24AM (#9322689) Journal
      Does anyone really need 60 GB of music.

      Not yet, but I'm reaching the high-end of 40GB, and since there's no 41GB drives, that leaves me going for a 60GB unit.

      I'm sure lots of people only have 10GBs of music like yourself, but many of us are going with significantly higher bitrates, and music libraries are growing fast...

    • by colmore ( 56499 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @01:17AM (#9322926) Journal
      I own and have ripped nearly three hundred CDs and have about 400 more on MP3 alone. This is after selling the ones that I don't like, which isn't many.

      I listen to all of them. Maybe not all of them on a regular basis, but I can't think of one that I'd be willing to say "I'm OK not listening to that ever again"

      It's nice having a big chunk of that library be able to travel around with me.

      While I'm certainly not everyone, there are people out there with even more than me. Just because most people are fine with a few hundred favorite songs, or a few dozen favorite albums, doesn't mean everyone is.

      Also, how many 60 GB external harddrives let you play music? There may be more economical solutions out there, but the ipod is more likely to be in your pocket when you need it, and the two birds with one stone factor is pretty big for some people.
  • July or August, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Snowspinner ( 627098 ) * <philsand&ufl,edu> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:38PM (#9322456) Homepage
    Seems perfectly timed to coincide with MacWorld. So that's two announcements we know about now - Tiger and the 60 GB iPod. Wonder what the surprise will be. 3.0 G5s? G5 notebooks? iPonies?
  • Use for 60GB HD (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:40PM (#9322473)
    for those complaining about not being able to fill the HD, the easiest way to use the space is to reencode the music you already have.

    just with some quick calculations i did on my own, saving your music as in a lossless format uses approx. 5x as much space as a 256kb MP3.

    so only 12GB of mp3's will give you your 60GB of music.
    • Re:Use for 60GB HD (Score:3, Interesting)

      by lavaface ( 685630 )
      saving your music as in a lossless format uses approx. 5x as much space as a 256kb MP3.

      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.

    • by CaptainCheese ( 724779 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @01:46AM (#9323039) Journal
      your plan has merits, but one colossal drawback.

      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...
  • Creative Labs to be specific Here [nomadworld.com]
  • by srcosmo ( 73503 ) <ultramegatron@gmail . c om> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:41PM (#9322480) Journal
    Will this new iPod have any other features? I picked up an iRiver iHP 120 [amazon.com] last month for a good $50 (Canadian) less than the similar-capacity iPod, and the iRiver has optical in/out, direct encoding to MP3 or WAV, OGG Vorbis support, USB 2.0, and an FM tuner.

    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?

    • by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:33AM (#9322741) Homepage
      The problem with the iRiver iHP 1x0 players is that they lack DRM. I'm currently leaning toward an iPod because of this. Most of my use will be for music I rip from CD, but I would like the option of buying the occasional single track from one of the online stores, when I don't like enough on an album to justify buying a CD.

      Also, the iPod works with Audible.com. The iRiver does not.

    • by nfotxn ( 519715 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @01:07AM (#9322889) Journal
      Apple more narrowly designs their products for a variety of reasons. Most people don't have any need for a portable encoding mp3 jukebox with optical IO as the world is mostly made up of non-geeks. Also remember that the iPod is almost a direct conduit to the iTMS (which we still don't have in Canada). So incorporating an FM tuner and on board encoding isn't in their best interest.

      As for the "hipster image", well, that's marketing and it's how they sell iPods. Most slashdotters may see it as disappointing that successful products aren't sold on specs. But the dominant group of consumers don't care. They'd much rather have something that's well culturally regarded ("hip") that they can figure out and utilize without too much effort. This is what Apple does and that's why they're so successful with this product. Also be glad that you can get what you want in the iHP 120. But it's unreasonable to expect Apple to market directly to a niche like geeks with the iPod.

  • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:42PM (#9322487)
    The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.

    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.
  • Woohoo! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tm2b ( 42473 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:43PM (#9322495) Journal
    My music collection is about 1500 CDs... I ripped them to AIFFs in iTunes and compress to other formats as necessary, as codecs (esp. Lame and Quicktime) improve (I use iTunes-Lame [blacktree.com] for MP3 compression). This translates to about 160 GB of 160 Kbps AACs. So this is big news for me - I'll be able to fit everything on 3 iPods instead of 4.

    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:Woohoo! (Score:4, Informative)

      by foo12 ( 585116 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:47PM (#9322515)
      Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car. Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless [apple.com]? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.
      • Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tm2b ( 42473 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:15AM (#9322635) Journal
        Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car.
        Well, with all due respect you don't have a very pricy car then - you'll probably spend more on gas this year. It takes about 900 GB, which costs about $1000, or about $.66 per CD. Worth it, I think, for being able to be totally random access in bulk.

        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.
        Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.
        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.
  • Drives? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheOtherKiwi ( 743507 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:46PM (#9322509) Homepage Journal
    Anyone notice that "Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000" but Apple are stepping up production from 800,000 to 1,000,000 per month...where are all the other drives sourced from?
  • Pricing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by maelstrom ( 638 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:47PM (#9322513) Homepage Journal
    So is Apple ever going to drop the pricing on the other models when they come out with more "advanced" ones?

    • Re:Pricing (Score:5, Informative)

      by johnpaul191 ( 240105 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:57PM (#9322559) Homepage
      usually the pricing stays about the same and the size just goes up...... often the towers will dot he same thing.... Fast, Faster and Fastest will stay about the same price but the specs will jump up a step. not always true, but often is.

      right now
      15gig = $299
      20 = $399
      40gig = $499

      it would make sense if....
      20 gig = $299
      40gig = $399
      60gig = $499
      or something like that depending on what drives are available

      though it depends on what kind of deal Apple get's on the drives..... Apple has said theyw ould like to lower the prices on the iPods as much as possible, but there is a set profit margin. as parts come down in price, so will retail prices. the iPod Mini follows another parts list and plan, and those drives are another manufacturer, so it's price has nothing much to do with this.
  • by achurch ( 201270 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:48PM (#9322522) Homepage

    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.

    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:45AM (#9322799)
      Granted the HD does not spin all the time. But I have had incidents where my iPod has been hurled on the floor at great velocity, and also driven along very bumpy roads with a sport suspension and the iPod playing the whole time - and this is the original 5GB model.

      I think few things short of a sledge hammer are even going to make the iPod skip, much less harm the drive. I have yet to ever hear the iPod skip for any reason.

      I did have a little less luck with a portable photo storage device that used an HD - I was jogging along with it in the lower pocket of my shorts bouncing against my leg while it was writing files from a CF card to the HD. In that case I did manage to get one bad sector on the drive, but that was pretty good considering the abuse it was going through (I wanted to see what extremes it could take for shock while operating). I don't know if that drive (standard laptop drive) was any differently speced than the iPod drive though.
  • by ErichTheWebGuy ( 745925 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:48PM (#9322523) Homepage
    Sure hope that this does not infringe on some Microsoft patent... They just might have a patent on "a mobile computing device with capacity greater than 50 gigabytes"... These days, you just never know.
  • by SteamyMobile ( 783822 ) <support@steamymobile.com> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:49PM (#9322529) Homepage
    With all of its other innovations (ie, the Macintosh), Apple sets itself up so that no one else can easily copy its unique design features. For example, MacOS has always had vastly better usability than anything else. It has taken years for MS Windows and KDE to catch up. That hasn't given Apple any kind of market dominance, but a lot of people still believe that if you buy a Mac, stuff just works and is easy and intuitive, and they're more right about that than with any other computer system type.

    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

    • Actually the iPod is pretty original... You have to see one side-by-side with any of the other players...they're a work of art. They also are more "hackable" than any of the others. They have their own OS, with a "community" of people writing PDA like apps for them... for most people it can replace getting a Palm too! Unlike all the other players trying desperately to lock you into THEIR service, Apple's lets you do lots of other non-music related stuff too...

      But mostly it's a work of art... note tha

    • by nikster ( 462799 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @05:56AM (#9323910) Homepage
      I went to the Apple Store SF last week (it's more like a cathedral of Apple, really - a clean, white, well-lit cathedral to adore sleek designs... anyway).

      They had some iPod minis coming in. Buying frenzy ensued, and the color ones (blue only) were sold out in half an hour. Imagine a 50% off sale of Hermes (or LV) bags in Japan - it was kind of like that.

      This is a fashion phenomenon, like none has happened in technology before. People buy them because they are sexy, sleek, the thing to have - especially the minis.

      So this is not just a piece of tech with a cool look. It's a cool look (if you want to put it that way) with a piece of tech. Therefore, the competition will fail - they don't get it. Of all tech companies, Sony is probably the only one which would be able to launch a successful competitor. But they haven't so far...

      The iPod, especially the mini, is about one thing: Being the coolest person in the gym - or in any other social situation. And you don't get there with a Dell, a Creative XYZ or an Archos whatever.

      The biggest danger to the iPod thing, therefore, is fashion itself. Fashion trends tend to be unstable and things that were cool last year tend to be not cool anymore this year. But i somehow think the iPod will be spared this fate - maybe the Design is too timeless for that to happen.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:55PM (#9322553)
    Lets get this out of the way:

    1. 60GB?!? Who would ever use that much space?
    2. 60GB?!? Thank god, I'm out of space on my 40GB.
    3. Does it support Ogg?
    4. Stop whining about Ogg!
    5. Apple rules!
    6. Apple sucks/is dying/is out of touch!
    7. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
    8. The Nomad/Muvo/two cans and a stick are just as good or better.
    9. I, for one, welcome our excessive HD space Overlords
    10. In Soviet Russia 60GB iPods buy You!
  • by zymano ( 581466 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:01AM (#9322577)
    You can buy hard drives with rebates for under $50 now. What's going on with the prices ?These microdrives are sexy but the cost $150-200 to manufacture. I don't mind carrying a slightly larger 20 gig model if it's priced right.
    • by gooberguy ( 453295 ) <gooberguy@gmail.com> on Thursday June 03, 2004 @01:32AM (#9322988)
      Do you realize how much power it takes to spin up a 3.5" drive? All external 3.5" USB drives need an AC adapter because a USB port can't provide enough power. Even a 5400RPM single platter drive can easily draw 10 watts constantly (mostly on the 12 volt rail). That means a 1250mAh battery (3G iPods have a 950mAh battery IIRC) could power just the drive (not including any MP3 decoding hardware) for about 90 minutes. Don't forget that because of their larger platters and heads, 3.5" drives are more vulnerable to bumps than their smaller laptop counterparts. So your idea for a cheap mp3 player would be great if you want a heavy, power-hungy mp3 player that will destory itself at the slightest jolt.

      Sorry to shoot your idea down so harshly, but now you know the reason no one makes portable mp3 players with 3.5" drives.
  • by SEE ( 7681 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:16AM (#9322645) Homepage
    What are you going to do with your terabyte iPod?
  • by TintinX ( 569362 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @01:08AM (#9322891) Homepage
    Rumours of a truly next gen multimedia iPod have been circulating for some time now.
    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.
  • by michaeldot ( 751590 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @05:44AM (#9323872)

    Microsoft's xPod will have 600 GB! It will go for 8 months on a single charge, and cost less than $50.

    Hell, we may even give them away in cereal packets!

    Please wait for it and don't go buying one of those silly white iPods. Our xPod will be black. Black is cool! It will run super-DRM, hyper-product activated music in the form of the industry standard (it's a STANDARD okay... or else) WMA, which is what everyone wants, in the sense of "here's where you're going today" kind of wants.

    And no, there is no truth that WMA stands for "We May Ask for your first child." Who do you think we are, bloodsucking vampires or something. (Looks like we'll have to start using smaller print on the EULAs.)

    Oh please please please wait for the Microsoft xPod. I wanna be just like you Steve. I've even started to wear turtlenecks and say "phenomenal" all the time... We wants it, the precious.

  • by Paulrothrock ( 685079 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @07:03AM (#9324153) Homepage Journal
    While I'm sure many people here would have no trouble filling a 60GB iPod, the real reason they're increasing the space so rapidly is their new feature Home-on-iPod. [appleinsider.com] This, coupled with home folder encryption, would allow for truly portable computing; just plug your iPod in and it's your Macintosh, with all your preferences set and all your libraries available. Sounds great to me!
  • by The Ape With No Name ( 213531 ) on Thursday June 03, 2004 @09:29AM (#9325330) Homepage
    Just a few reminders of what various slashdotters originally though of the iPod before "iPods are the shiznit" became /. canon.

    "iPod is a good product, but nothing to get excited over." - harlows_monkeys

    "It's not cool at all. It's just another Mac attempt to have the coolest looking, hippest sounding gadget on the market. It adds nothing serious to the current options. For instance, no Ogg Vorbis support (and yes, I realize it probably decodes mp3 in hardware, but...) and it doesn't appear to be cross-platform. I guess this falls into the Dilbert principle of "the best target market is stupid rich people." Since they'll fall for anything and have the money to burn on it." - ichimunki

    "...the "rose-colored glasses that you will need for this to seem like a worthwhile product. What a let-down, geez!!" - david614

    "People need to realize that all apple ever really delivers is mediocre equipment that, while it may look really cool, is less technically advanced/powerfull/whatever than competing products that cost 20-25% less." - greysky

    "A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else. Agree with the article poster - Lame. Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit (which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners), but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product. A total waste of time." - Ars-Fartsica

    "I'd rather pay $100 for a Rio Volt. 700mb of songs per CD with an unlimited number of CD's, provided you change them. Yeah, this should compete favorably with the solid state units, but they've already lost to the CD-MP3 units, IMO." - Fred Ferrigno

    "I think it'll sell as well as the G4 Cube. Oops. ;-)" - jaoswald

    "And I was all excited they were gooing to release a OS X based wireless web pad. Instead we get yet another portable MP3 player .. "groundbreaking" I think was the term I heard them use to describe this new secret product the other day. How "groundbreaking" can something be when I can walk up the street and buy something with similar (and in some cases, additional/better) features? Sigh. One day Apple will live up to the hype. OS X is cool, and their plastic molding team has skills, but the hardware just sucks." - nebby

    "I am very sad that Apple seems to be repeating the same mistake they made with the Cube - great, nifty product that anyone would love to own, except that it's burdened by an unbelievably poor price/performance ratio." - jchristopher (Apple shareholder)

    "...this was a VERY poor design decision. This could have been a $150 device if they'd used a regular laptop drive." - jchristopher again

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