“Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, shot down market rumors of 60-gigabyte models in the pipeline. ‘We have no plans in regard to announcing 60-gigabyte models,’ Joswiak said. “‘We are trying to create a much more compelling lineup with two models for 20 and 40 gigabytes at extremely compelling prices,'” Reuters reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “No plans in regard to announcing 60GB iPods” does not mean “no plans in regard to designing, building, and eventually shipping 60GB iPods.” After this non-denial denial, the question remains, will customers have the option for “15,000 songs in their pockets” by this year’s Christmas shopping season?
Related MacDailyNews article:
Apple smartly holds back 60GB iPod debut – July 19, 2004
Apple execs miffed over Toshiba’s 60GB iPod hard drive leak – June 04, 2004
If he’s not lying then the Toshiba 60gig drives are for something else – and that would be even more exciting!
I think they’ll ship the 60 GB model. Just not now. II’d definitely expect it by the Christmas season.
Yep, they’re coming. It’ll just be September at the earliest before they arrive. They’ve learned their lesson about hyping products that they can’t deliver for 2+ months, so they’re trying to overly downplay this one.
The 60GB harddisks have enough capacity to be even put into an advanced tablet Mac. Probably we will have a G4 based tablet mac with 1.8″ disks coming out pretty soon.
Toshiba probably got ‘Steved’ for spilling the beans about Apple being a customer for their shiny new 60GB drives.
The drives will probably show up in iPods eventually, but not before Toshiba gets a taste of some ‘have your people keep their mouths shut, or else’.
Glad to see the 4G iPods. Nice. My wife just received a personalized, green MiniPod. She loves it. The click wheel is really cool and I’m glad they decided to incorporate it into the Snow iPod.
Hmmmm I’d doubt the tablet. Not that an Apple tablet wouldn’t kick ass but… its really not that big of a market. Really. I work in a big computer store. Nobody buys tablets.
Now, I could definitely see the 60gb drives in some sort of new Apple portable gizmo. My colleague is betting on what he calls “iSnap” – a 5 megapixel digital camera with a built in hard drive. Me personally I could see them doing a sub-notebook. Smaller than an iBook but bigger than a PDA. Seen Sony’s little 10″ laptop? It’s spiffy (for a peecee).
The dreamer in me is still holding out for a new Apple PDA ;-}
Joswiak also said that no G5 iMac was in the pipeline….
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Perhaps the new iMac will have mini-drives behind it’s flat screen. I doubt it since heat sinks would take as much room as a typical HD depth.
A new consumer device? Too small for a video device. I can’t see the musical capacity need either. Maybe there is little need for a 60 gig mini-drive in Apple’s lineup. Sony might want it for one of their “mistakes” in the consumer space.
haha.. yeah..those drives are going into MACS.. not iPods
“‘We are trying to create a much more compelling lineup with two models for 20 and 40 gigabytes at extremely compelling prices,'”
There is going to be a 60 Gb iPod, it will have a color LCD screen and third party companies will be able to write mini applications for it. Games too.
That’s why the iPod mini’s controls were added to the higher end iPod line. Easier to play games etc with.
Many small drives are cheaper and more flexible than one large drive.
The new G5 iMacs will have a micro-RAID system based on it’s big brother, the Xserve RAID, where data is stored in parallel (with on-the-fly parity backup) along a bank of micro drives. This would make the drives hot-swapable without losing ANY data if one goes down.
For those of you without any Wintel-usin’ friends, this is a VERY sensitive topic. All too often, whether it is via a virus, a Windows OS “glitch”, or hardware failure, is is VERY common for someone to lose ALL of their data on their hard drive. Techs frequently say to customers, “There is no fix other than to reformat your hard drive. Sorry!”
Imagine a computer that does NOT lose your data (unless more than 1 hard drive is physically destroyed simultaneously).
With parallel storage, an additional side benefit is a vastly increased data transfer rate. This increased size, speed and reliability will be the best place to store large libraries of photos, music as well as a great place for video editing and animation rendering. What appears to be a huge leap in home computer hard drive design is simply applying existing technologies on a smaller scale, and with very little (if any) cost increase.
Going one step further with Apple’s existing technology…
“The RAID controller automatically reads Self-Monitoring, Analysis, Reporting Technology (SMART) data from each hard drive. SMART data lets you take preemptive measures. It allows the drive to report its health, and enables the operating system to warn you of a pre-failure condition � and gives you an opportunity to replace the hard drive before a failure occurs. The goal? Uptime, all the time.”
See more about how Apple RAIDS operate at http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ .
Thinking outside the box by simply using what’s already in the box.
mdn in previous article says, “our sources “guarantee” that there is a 60 GB model. Unfortunately, these same sources can’t tell us whether this will be “one more thing” to be announced tomorrow alongside the other two models noted in the Newsweek coverage or if the 60GB will come later this summer.”
You need new sources.
I wonder what the possibilities would be of this 60GB drive going into a G5 Powerbook. They obviously don’t put off that much heat (my iPod never gets as hot as my iBook drive ever got) and this would be a big plus when trying to deal with the huge heat problem a G5 in a portable would produce. If you decrease the heat the hard drive produces, that allows for greater flexibility in the handling the heat the processor produces. I don’t know how feasible using one of these drives in a pro machine is, but it’s an idea anyways.
See what I say that MDN should stop spreading rumors and especially unfounded ones.
Boeing777 wrote:
Maybe MDN should stop speculating too much.
What will you write next if the 60G isn’t revealed at Paris?
[Is Apple saving 60GB iPod debut for whenever?]
At this point, a 60 GB iPod would not offer anything more than bragging rights for most users. If you started a CD collection from the late 80s, how much space would you need if your music is encoded at 128 kbs? I am not saying that there are no libraries out there that take up more than 40 GB of space but for the vast majority of iPod users there is no need for the bigger capacities.
Joel, the heat produced by a hard drive is not detectable by the human hand. In short, it doesn’t produce any significant amount of heat to consider. In a computer, the CPU is by far and away the major heat producer. In your iPod, any heat you feel was imparted by your own hand into the iPod.
Many small drives are cheaper and more flexible than one large drive.
More flexible, okay. Less expensive, huh? Got an example of where, say, two 80GB drives are cheaper than one 160GB drive?
If you started a CD collection from the late 80s, how much space would you need if your music is encoded at 128 kbs? I am not saying that there are no libraries out there that take up more than 40 GB of space but for the vast majority of iPod users there is no need for the bigger capacities.
Sol,
The answer is 110 Gigabytes. For me, at least.
Of course, I’m small potatoes when compared to Karl Lagerfeld, who has 60,000 CDs and 40 iPods…
> I work in a big computer store. Nobody buys tablets. — More choice at the pharmacy.
> Toshiba probably got ‘Steved’…. — Can’t ‘Steve’ them if there is no other source or they’d get ‘Toshiroed’ back.
> Greg Joswiak … shot down market rumors of 60-gigabyte models in the pipeline…. — Not yet in the pipeline then ‘sall it means.
> They obviously don’t put off that much heat…. — The G5 is the heat slut.
> I could definitely see the 60gb drives in some sort of new Apple portable gizmo. — Airport Express Plus with video jack? More likely new synchronizing and backup software for the iPod — iMatch.
> Imagine a computer that does NOT lose your data…. — Any Mac, though this would be a good idea for Windoze. It’s just a matter of time before one X.n LiM-rated virus wipes out half the world’s data causing billions of dollars in damage.
Karl Lagerfeld’s 40 iPods are apparently filled with uncompressed classical music. He could save himself a lot of trouble by compressing the tracks but you know how anal audiophiles can be.
Anyway, I stand by my original statement: most people do not need more than 40 GB for their CD collections. Of course people who downloaded all they could from Napster, Kazaa, etc will never have an MP3 player big enough to hold all their files.
If Steve Jack’s theory is correct then this is exactly what you would expect Apple to say. They want to have the emphasis on the cheaper prices this time and are learning from past experience. Toshiba’s foot just sunk deeper down their throat.
I was wrong. Karl Lagerfeld has 40 iPods because there are over sixty thousand CDs in his personal collection. I thought I read somewhere that he stored it all uncompressed but that was propably my imagination. Sorry for calling you ‘anal’ Karl.
Now what is it with people here saying that Toshiba got punished for its leak a few weeks ago? Some Mac users have a habit of being negative about all of Apple’s partners, be it Motorola, ATI or Toshiba. So mistakes were made; is that enough reason for Apple to refuse the 60 GB drives? I don’t think so.
Sol…obviously you don’t know the Steve Jobs history in this regard. Yes, he punishes suppliers that leak.
Who needs a 60 gig iPod anyway? 90% of iPod users only have appr. 10 gigs.
I’ll be getting one of the new 4G iPods, and I would have been satisfied with 10 gigs, but the smallest one is 20 gigs. I gues I’ll just reencode at a higher bitrate then…
There’s no punishment going on here. The 60 GB drive is probably only just starting to enter production. It takes a while to ramp up. Apple wants to sell as many 20 and 40 GB as possible. If they say the 60 GB is coming next month or the month after then people would delay a purchase and sales of the 40 GB would suffer. From a marketing standpoint it would be foolish to offer both 40 and 60 at this time. If you want to carry 15,000 songs with you then you’ll need to wait until or when the 60 GB arrives. After all, you need all those tunes in your iPod so you can listen to them every single day. 40 GB is plenty. As a matter of fact I’ve read that the 15 GB and 20GB iPods outsold the 40 GB by a wide margin…. as does the mini. The supersizing trend continues… more then you need…. the same childish crap of “larger is better” in today’s culture.