“According to our source (who asked to remain anonymous), Apple has been working on a smaller, mass-market iPhone for a long time,” Leander Kahney reports for Cult of Mac. “But to do that, Apple had to figure out a way to strip away some of the components to reduce both its size and cost.”
“Apple decided to lose some of the memory, which is by far the most expensive component of the iPhone (up to one-quarter of the device’s cost, according to iSuppli estimates),” Kahney reports. “By ‘some’ of the memory, we mean ALL of the memory. The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud. ‘I’m talking strictly storage memory here,’ said our source.”
Kahney reports, “The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com…”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
@ stephen: banded? I lived through terminal computing, and let me tell you, having control of your data on-site is much, much better in every way. The “cloud” is salesman-speak for contractual computing — i.e., keep paying up, suckers.
As for phone: on-board storage is ESSENTIAL. nobody is going to want to be forced into continuous internet connectivity to to basic tasks that any decent phone can do without a connection:
– pull up your address book
– take notes and dictation
– play music/movies you already own
– take pictures and movies
– and so forth.
Martin is correct — since Apple can’t guarantee bandwidth at all times, they must add storage. No intelligent user would buy a dumb terminal with no offline capability, and a majority of the market is actually shunning the high cost data plans that Verizon and AT&T are offering.
Apple is most likely attempting its first true universal world phone, which means some of you armchair critics should step outside the USA and see how different — and quite often better — the rest of the planet is.
This can work (and even make sense), as long as you move passed the notion (the mental block) that this “iPhone nano” needs to be an iPhone.
Apple makes a huge profit from every iPhone, due to the up front subsidy payment from the carrier. Apple already has a $49 iPhone, but it is subsidized, so the same level of profit is there. Apple is NOT going to introduce a contract-free “cheap iPhone” that can potentially reduce iPhone sales. That would be stupid.
But what Apple may do is introduce a phone that is NOT an iPhone. Maybe it’s still called an “iPhone (whatever),” but it is NOT an iOS device. Such a product will not steal customers from the “profit machine” iPhone; it will steal customers from low-end Nokia and other commodity phone makers.
A typical “cheap” mobile phone has a camera and takes photos (but not video). Photos do not take up too much space and can be stored (without GBs of storage) until the next sync. The original iPhone and iPhone 3GS took photos but not video; that’s what iPhone nano will do.
Streaming audio does not take up too much data. That’s what services like Pandora (and Internet radio stations) do already. iPhone nano will work like that, but using your own music stored in MobileMe. Of course it will not work when there is no signal; that would be the customer’s expectation. And no steaming video. iPhone nano does not do video at all, like the current iPod nano.
Like iPod nano, iPhone nano does not run iOS, but mimics its look and feel. No “apps,” just the built-in functionality. No WiFi. No Bluetooth. No high power A4 processor. No Retina Display. No FaceTime. If you want all those things in a mobile phone, get a “real” iPhone. For customers who just want a “regular” mobile phone without expensive contract commitment, done the “Apple way,” here’s the new iPhone nano.
I hope it has a slot for a memory stick for storage then otherwise it will probably be an iflop.
What cloud? So what you’re saying is that this will work really well in my bedroom. But the minute I step outside the house…
Until wifi is just on everywhere, and free, like radio, the cloud won’t work properly.
RUMOR: Apple to create iPhone shuffle. Has just one phone app that randomly calls numbers on your network until you get to the number you wanted to call