Apple Releases New iPods

[figment1986]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

Just heard unverified scuttlebutt that the price will drop again in December and a newer version with more storage will be available

Heard indirectly from someone at AT&T. Take it for what it's worth.

I would not doubt it, considering the ipod touch is an iphone with no phone and has a 16gb model...

[Kevy Baby]

I'm waiting for the 1 TB model

[CoasterMatt]

I'd rather have my Creative Zen, it has an fm radio and voice recorder, and the sound output is better (imho).

[Kevy Baby]

But does it have 1 TB capacity?

[CoasterMatt]

I have seen this model modded to 160gb, and a new 320gb hd that matches size/pinout specs has just come out, so I'd imagine that would be the next step.

[Kevy Baby]

But it still isn't 1 TB

How long until we exabyte sized drives for our 'puters?

[Alex]

It took 16 years to get from 1GB hard drives to 1TB hard drives, so assuming similar pacing for similar proportional leaps:

32 years.

Though more interesting is whether, at least for home use, such storage would ever make any sense. 1 exabyte would hold about 35.7 million HD-DVDs.

[Alex]

Also amusing, since I got to poking around, using the benchmark here for the current 1TB hard drive.

In fastest write speed from an external source it took 31 seconds to write 1GB of data. That means 31,000 seconds to write one terabyte; 31,000,000 seconds to write 1 petabyte; and 31,000,000,000 seconds to write on exabyte.

31,000,000,000 seconds equals about 982 years. So, not only do we need to wait for the exabyte hard drive, but we'll need to live a lot longer if we want to ever fill it. (I know, if such a thing ever came to be, write speeds would presumably have increased immensely as well).

Also from poking around, the current "pie in the sky" data density for hard drives is (I think) 1 terabit/in^2. That would be an 8,000 square inch hard drive just to get to a petabyte, and 8 million square inches for an exabyte. That would a hard drive 1.2 acres in size.


(And, of course, having wasted my time doing math with big numbers it will turn out that I forgot to carry a zero or something and everything is way off.)

[innerSpaceman]

All I know is I'm glad I got my Nano when i did. I hate the new square design.


I've played with iPhones ... and they do nothing for me. I guess I really don't care about the interface, and am only interested in function.

[RStar]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

Also know as the iPhone without a phone.

iPhone- $599

8gig iPod Touch (with WiFi)- $299

So, the phone component is $300 ($200 now, I guess after seeing this $100 rebate thingy)? I can buy a wirelss phone for $20, why are cell phones so expensive? I know the parts are smaller, and have to reach a cell site much further away than a cordless base, but come on. The iPod touch has the transmitter and reciever parts for the WiFi already. And it probably has the same battery which can be expensive.

Is part of the cost going to the cell phone company for royalties to use their software?? Or are they pricing it at $299 (making little- to no profit) knowing most people wouln't spend much more (hell, I don't have an iPod because I can't afford it now- and I don't listen to music on headsets anyway. I never had a personal radio at all, and never will unless I use a base at work).