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6th Generation iPod Tracking For Late 2007? Early 2008?

DCBass said:
Perhaps, but how soon do you think WiMax will be deployed throughout the U.S.? I'm certainly not going to hold my breath. I don't think the economics of it will come into place for another few years yet.
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Sprint has announced a wimax deployment plan. It is pretty agressive. One of the cool things about wimax is the range is very similar to analog cellular, so they can just be added to every existing tower. No new easements required beyond existing cellular system growth organically. One can presume ATT too has a deployment plan, which they have not discussed publicly. I for one think (speculate) Apple is contracted to provide much of the network hardware in connection with the exclusive contract, thus greatly lowering ATT deployment costs.

On the downside the revenue model is not nearly as favorable as cellular. Many of the cell tower locatins involve pretty expensive leases. So even if wimax displaces a significant share of cellular, which it could, the cost might not drop much below half of what we pay for cellular now, even though internet is allegedly "nearly free".

More good news is it will result in widespread deployment of location independent broadband. It also means the resistence to an Apple branded solution is nill since it is not cellular.

Rocketman

Thanks for concatenating my prior posts Doctor Q.

Deployed wimax links from ATT
http://www.attalascom.com/about/timeline.html
http://www.attalascom.com/press/gerszberg.html

Link from /.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/03/04/2313213.shtml
 
Ha, I just checked the size of my mp3 collection (not currently in iTunes):

32.68 GB. :rolleyes:
 
And as long as they can still sell around 10 till 14 million iPods just current quarter, why would Apple even launch a new one. The MP3 market became a commodity, and Creative, MS, iRiver and others, don't seem to be able to break in this market, without a significant investment/loss. Of course, Apple has models laying around, and for much lower pricepoints as the competition can deliver for. So, only if there is a real business need, Apple will pull the trigger and give us this thing. (And will not be able to keep up with demand, as usual). But for now, they can milk the new iPhone, expirement with :apple:TV, and just wait what the market will do. Pretty good position for a company to be in. Bad for us, Apple fans.

You want Apple to release a widescreen iPod fast? Tell everyone to stop buying the current one :D
 
While this delay really does suck, I'm actually half-happy about it, because I just recently recieved a 5.5 gen iPod.....I'd be pretty mad/sad if they came out with a new iPod a few months after I got one....:/
 
i can see a lot of people want the higher capacities kept. What's going to stop Apple from making a 32GB Flash iPod and a 100GB HDD iPod?
 
MarcelV said:
And as long as they can still sell around 10 till 14 million iPods just current quarter, why would Apple even launch a new one. The MP3 market became a commodity, and Creative, MS, iRiver and others, don't seem to be able to break in this market, without a significant investment/loss. Of course, Apple has models laying around, and for much lower pricepoints as the competition can deliver for. So, only if there is a real business need, Apple will pull the trigger and give us this thing. (And will not be able to keep up with demand, as usual). But for now, they can milk the new iPhone, expirement with :apple:TV, and just wait what the market will do. Pretty good position for a company to be in. Bad for us, Apple fans.

You want Apple to release a widescreen iPod fast? Tell everyone to stop buying the current one :D
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Will that is true....Apple doesn't always do that, less so in the iPod part of the company(they did it with the G4s laptop, but also because the had hit a wall, however they could have press IBM for low powered G5, or gone to AMD/Intel sooner.) But Apple replaced the Mini w/ the Nano when the Mini still was selling very well
 
Where's my Pod?

I just want a new iPod... Don't care what it has or doesn't have. I never listen to my entire library anyway. Its about 15 or so GBs and I may listen to about 10 different albums at any given time and that's usually a song or four at a time from each album. I may carry around 1 GB everyday. For long trips I may listen to about 4 or so GBs of music. The other 5 or 6 Gigs of stuff is Heroes and Battlestar Galactica episodes.

Anyway... my point it.... if the new pod is video capable and has the UI of the iPhone but only has 32 GBs of space then I will still get it. Unless it costs $400 :eek: . If they price it at $300 and make a model with 64GB or so for $500 then I will get the larger model and grow into it. Tech always changes and sometimes it is for the worst. Like the iSight. Can't find em in the stores. Where'd they go?

Just give me the new video iPod and I will love it just because of that new UI and new design. :cool:
 
i have a feeling this will be really awesome... we've had the 5th gen since october 2005 with only one significant update.
 
Rocketman said:
I for one think (speculate) Apple is contracted to provide much of the network hardware in connection with the exclusive contract, thus greatly lowering ATT deployment costs.
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I don't think Apple has the technology to provide carrier-level networking solutions. AT&T's equipment vendors would be companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Nortel, Sycamore Networks, Juniper Networks, Nokia Siemens, ADTRAN, Tellabs, Secunia, Redback Networks....to name some.

That leads to an interesting and somewhat related topic... Alcatel-Lucent's recent 1.52-billion dollar lawsuit victory over Microsoft, regarding MP3 encoding and compression usage, has some people speculating that Apple might be a suit target as well. I suspect now that AT&T and Apple are close partners, Alcatel-Lucent will not sue Apple. AT&T is Alcatel-Lucent's most important customer - they don't want to upset them. Further, Alcatel-Lucent has a lot to gain on the success of the AT&T-Apple partnership. If things go well, AT&T will need to buy more Alcatel-Lucent access equipment.

In fact, it's all quite tightly connected. It's interesting to remember that Bell Labs, renamed Lucent after it was spun off of AT&T, generates a goodly amount of its revenue through the licensing (and protection) of their tens of thousands of technology patents. If it comes to anything, I would guess a quiet back-room deal (maybe brokered by AT&T to some degree) would be made between Alcatel-Lucent and Apple.

With that said, I bet that Alcatel-Lucent would love to take a billion bucks from Cisco - another company that's licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer. The two vendors are heated rivals.
 
DCBass said:
I dunno, I personally think it would be pretty weak if it didn't have wifi.
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i haven't seen any sensible use for wifi in a mp3-player, have you? besides, removing wifi would do good at differentiating ipod and iphone.
 
can't take capacity away!

A 32GB flash-based iPod sounds great, but that as the cap of the lineup for the 6G would quite simply suck. I have a year old 60GB 5G and it has only a couple of gigs left, and I do access a lot of that content as I have used my iPod daily for the past year of ownership. Right now I think sticking with HDD based machinery is the way to go since it provides the best capacity for the money. A 100GB iPod and perhaps a 40-50GB lower end model would fare much better right now until flash tech gets better and cheaper. An iPod asking for a price similar to the current high end while providing half, or less than half of the capacity would probably not do well.

Right now I'm not sure about the benefits of WiFi. So far the Zune's capabilities are mainly useless because of the crippleware scheme that is DRM. In order for the WiFi to work in an iPod, it has to do so much more.
 
Rocketman said:
The manufacturing cost difference would be low and I suspect what you really want is a lower price point. For Apple that simply means lower margins for essentially the same product.
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Well, Apple is already making quite a large profit from each iPhone sale if the estimated cost of manufacturing numbers are anywhere near accurate. Perhaps this was on purpose, since they could tout that it replaces so many products to justify the cost, and it would also leave them plenty of room to price the iPod and still make a decent profit (because, yes, the manufacturing costs would be about the same I imagine, but they know they can't sell an iPod at the same price point that they sell their iPod/phone/PDA all-in-one-wonder).

Also, you'd have to consider that the profit on the iPhone will increase considerably once R&D is paid off, which isn't as much of a consideration for the iPod (since it could piggy back quite a bit on the iPhone).
 
7th Gen

I'm waiting for my 7th gen iPod, with frameless OLED screen, 200GB flash drive, 3d gaming, 20h video battery life,and wireless charging and data transfer. also, its gonna be half an inch thick and with multitouch:p :p
 
Please, Not In 2008

I can't stand wait beyond that this Xmas season. Now some people saying will be here by 2008, just makes me cry.

October seems reasonable to me.
5" widescreen, touchscreen UI, 120 gig and price around $400 maybe $500 tops , I am sold.

I don't care for the iPhone because AT&T (Cingular) and the small storage, so I rather buy a widescreen iPod and keep my current phone and carrier. I bet tons of people are on the same boat as I am.
 
Most of this rumour is wishful thinking.

Until the day comes when flash memory for the regular iPod form factor is cheaper per gigabyte than HDD, we won't see it. Just look at flash memory prices to "predict" when Apple would be releasing flash-based iPods. Late 2007, early 2008 is still a fairly aggressive estimate.

Technology progresses naturally, so in the meantime, enjoy your HDD iPods and your flash nanos. :p
 
spicyapple said:
Most of this rumour is wishful thinking.

Until the day comes when flash memory for the regular iPod form factor is cheaper per gigabyte than HDD, we won't see it. Just look at flash memory prices to "predict" when Apple would be releasing flash-based iPods. Late 2007, early 2008 is still a fairly aggressive estimate.

Technology progresses naturally, so in the meantime, enjoy your HDD iPods and your flash nanos. :p
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They ditched the hugely successful iPod Mini with larger capacity for the Nano because of the advantages of NAND...
 
psychofreak said:
They ditched the hugely successful iPod Mini with larger capacity for the Nano because of the advantages of NAND...
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I think there was another reason. They were aware others were working on competitive NAND based products, and Apple had to make a move. Because there is no place for two pretty identical products in Apple's iPod line (the Mini and Nano were really targetting the same audience), they had not much choice.
Apple was able to enhance their market lead by buying the NAND in very large quantities. Therefore making it hard for others to launch similar players in the market place for more attractive prices. Because others had almost no profit margins, they initially couldn't match the price point, and for sure had no room to make a splash.
 
The updates were enhancements at best, nothing really spectacular. All they got was improved battery life, brighter displays (which is meaningless to me since I lower the brightness) and upgraded headphones. There were enough upgrades to the UI that some were unable to be passed down to the rev A 5G, but beyond that I see few if any real world differences other than the 20GB boost on the higher end model, but this should've meant a slight boost in the 30 as well. Basically these are just stopgap items until whenever it is they release the new one.
 
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