Difference btw Mac and Windows ipods?

Performance wise there is no difference
Only thing is that Mac formatted can only be used with Mac's. Windows formatted can be used with both mac & windows.

 

After researching, I believe that if the iPod is windows formatted, it will not be able to work with ical and other mac programs. If anyone is able to correct me that would be appreciated for I too am still wondering the benefits of formatting for a mac.

 

a "windows" ipod is formatted as fat32 and cannot hold files larger than 2GB. afaik that's the only difference in the actual ipod.

 

It's actually 4GB, which still sucks when you're trying to transfer large files. Since iPods are only officially supported on Windoze XP/2000 I don't know why they don't use NTFS and remove the file size limit.

 

Because Microsoft has not released details on how to write to an NTFS filesystem to the public. NTFS is supported under Linux and OS X as a read only file system.

If I remember correctly, NTFS stores a cryptographic hash code for each file stored. As far as I am aware the algorithm for calculating this code has not been reverse engineered. These hash codes are used to verify the filesystem so without the ability to compute the appropriate hash code for a file it is not possible to write a file to NTFS without Windows compaining about the integrity of the file system being violated.

 

so if I have an iPod that I use with a windows machine, and I buy a mac, what do I have to do?

 

Well you don't have to do anything. You can just leave it synced to your Windows PC if you would like.

 

If you want to continue using the iPod with the windows machine and the mac then you do nothing and it will continue to work.

If you want to change the iPod so that it is formated using the HFS+ (Mac) filesystem then you use the iPod Update utility on the Mac to reformat the iPod. Reformating the iPod will wipe all music and files off the iPod so you need to ensure that you have all of your music stored on one of the computers.

Formating the iPod using HFS+ means that you will not be able to use the iPod with Windows. (Unless you buy a third party HFS+ driver for windows such as MacDrive or MacOpener.)

 

Acutally, one of the new features of Tiger was finally being able to read AND WRITE to NTFS volumes...

 

Got an offical link mentioning this?

All I've been able to find is discussions of accessing an NTFS partition remotely (which is really accessing it via smb and relying on Windows to access the actual NTFS filesystem).