i think they should stop using a hard drive for the storage in the regular iPod and go to using flash memory like in the nano... just, a lot of it. what do u think?
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iPod i think they should cancel the hard drive...
- Thread starter sam10685
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Flash memory is still WAY too expensive to put 30 or 60 GB in an iPod (probably not enough room for all the chips either). I suppose the nice thing is that you could RAID the chips inside and use a FW800 port to sync your iPod at a sick speed. 
This is the key. I'm sure they would if they could.strider42 said:
An 8 GB flash drive is about $400. Take away the USB connection and other unnecessary parts, and factor in a bulk discount, Apple might able to get 8GB of flash for $300? Ok, $200 is probably way out of the question, but let's go with that.
30 GB iPods needs almost 4 cards.
4 times $200 is $800.
$800 + everything else you need to make an iPod = $1000?
Who is going to pay that much for an iPod. I know these are estimates (and probably poor estimates at that, they are more like guesses), but I hope you get the point.
x86isslow said:
i'm going to make it so 100 GB's of data will all fit on a flash chip the size of ur thumb nail.
grapes911 said:
grapes ain't sour. This is a pretty good estimate/explanation.
Basically, cost is what it boils down to. If they had to, they could cram a bunch of chips into an iPod size; but the cost is the killer. Right now, the cheapest $/GB flash I can find is a Sandisk 4 GB CompactFlash module for $140. That's $35 per gigabyte. Even if we assume Apple could get a 75% bulk discount (REALLY unlikely, but hey, we want ridiculously low prices, and Apple has gotten amazing deals on their hard drives and flash before,) that's still $8.75 per gigabyte, or $262.50 for 30 GB. Since a 30 GB iPod now retails for $299, that leaves only $36.50 for the rest of the iPod's bits; without making a profit, and not including assembly, advertising, etc. And for a 60 GB iPod, the memory alone would cost $26 MORE than the retail price of the current 60 GB iPod.
That's not even taking size into consideration. (Although Sony just announced an 8 GB Memory Stick Duo, 10 of which is smaller than a single 1.8" hard drive, so it might actually be possible to reduce the size of the iPod by moving to flash.)
A 1.8" drive is 70 mm x 54 mm x 7 mm, 46 g, for a total volume of 26,460 mm^3; a Memory Stick Duo is 20 mm x 31 mm x 1.6 mm, 2 g, for a total volume of 992 mm^3, times 10 is 9,920 mm^3, 20 g, still significantly smaller than the 1.8" drive.