Apple's 1GB Nano
All I have to say on this is that it's about time! I mean I love apple products, I really do but they do have their flaws as well as their many advantages.
Firstly lets talk about the shuffle. It was an awesome concept, small, compact, affordable what more could a person want? Only there were already existing products out there, similar to this with DISPLAY SCREENS! Now I wouldn't want to spend £69 or £99 on a product that has no display screen.
So, I bought the ipod mini. It was in between an ipod (which I personally find too bulky to carry) and a shuffle (that was too small in capacity and no display screen). Not only that, the mini's casing is pretty scratch proof, which is a bonus too. All in all, the mini was fine, maybe they could have added a colour screen to it at some point. But noo...they release the nano and make the mini obsolete.
Now, I find it pretty impressive that they were able to produce a product that thin and light. Basically it was a shuffle with a screen (the article I've linked to proves this more so). However a) the screen scratched way too easily and b) it's just so fragile. Not only that, the 2GB nano cost slightly more (or maybe around the same) as a 4gb mini. To be honest, I personally don't care much for the colour screen and the picture thing. All I want an ipod for is to play my music and I would rather pay for a 4GB mini than a 2GB nano.
Recently, they've decided to make a 1GB nano. At first I thought, great, why couldn't they have done that in the first place instead of the shuffle. They've also reduced the price of the shuffle, which is good too, now if I wanted an mp3 player without a screen I'd want it to be CHEAP!
However, a few problems with the 1GB nano.
1) There is a £30 difference between a 1GB and a 2GB. If Apple are going to make a 1GB nano, atleast make it slightly cheaper. I'd rather fork out the extra £30 and buy the 2GB. I mean really, £30 difference between something that's twice as much storage space.
2) Apple said the 1GB Nano can hold 240 four-minute 128Kbps AAC tracks, the same as the 1GB Shuffle. What it didn't explain, however, was how the 2GB device can hold 500 songs formatted the same way. In other words, that 100 per cent extra capacity can hold 108 per cent more songs.
What are people's thoughts on this?
PS I only paid £28 for my mini :D
posted by Femma Ashraf at 9:54 PM
1 Comments:
well, the lack of screen on the shuffle was a weight and size factor and as much as i have no time for them they do have a market that loves them and i personally put this down to 2 things, a) a market that wants the apple logo but cant afford/wont pay the apple price for their "better" products, like Mercedes A-Class owners being considered by many in the car business as the people who want to show off the Mercedes keyfob without having the money for their at least decent C class model and the ones above that and b) people who like the software bundled with it, some people hate the itunes software, others love it but after all of this i personally have found it to be the most reliable (mac and windows) and easy to use portable music player organiser software, and i have used many, ranging from phillips, creative and hp to my original mp3 player, the first of its kind (also the inspiration for apple's click wheel design), the Rio (the company that owns them no longer make mp3 players)
as far as the price diff for the doubling your space goes, well, i bought my sister a 2gb nano for christmas when the 4gb was only £40 more and i bought myself the 4gb mini last summer when again there was only a £40 diff for the 6gb, on top of this everyone i asked xmas time bought their kids 2gb nanos, the only one who didnt was my cousin who was acting like a bit of a spoiled brat (at 19 ffs!) and demanded the 4gb and nothing less so why do people do this? well, come christmas time that £40 is a big difference especially with the rest of christmas prices and also there must have been demand for this, apple have a very thorough and comprehensive feed back system (i've used it to discuss a better way of manually adding music to your ipod via itunes) and there are also forums for people to discuss apple stuff on the apple website, apple are bound to have people buy these things, they want to keep their over 85% grip on the market growing! tho this does make them a microsoft, but they do have a decent product, the only decent think to come out of redmond was office!
this thing will mostly appeal to shoestring budget students who want the glamour of an ipod. also, the comments on tracks vs storage space, this is because they discuss whole tracks that you can store on the player, so you can if you had 240 128kbps 4 min songs on the 2gb player there will be space left but not enough for a whole 4 minutes, also its because there ipod software sits on the storage area and not a separate flash memory (there is a flash eprom in them with firmware, but it acts like a bios(or more appropriatley, and EFI)) so at 1gb this software can take up say 3% of the hdd (hypothetical) and in reality of the 2gb, it takes up 1% because memory blocks on the 2gb storage will be at least half the size of 1gb blocks. a quick explanation of blocks: storage spaces is divided into blocks (discs are physically divided into sectors and tracks but each sector/track combo is a block) and blocks are of a set finite and fixed size, now blocks get allocated entirely to things that are going to be stored in them, as opposed to being given just enough space to store their data, this is down to addressing issues like its damn had to give every speck of iron on the disc face a unique address because no 2 hard drives are exactly the same. This is why when you look at the info of program in windows, linux/unix and mac you see "size" info and "actual size on disk" and the latter tends to always be bigger, much noticeable if yer prog is only 4k and yer disk block sizez are 64k (so the size on disk would be 64k, 60k being wasted). This is another reason why u can get more music on the bigger ipods
11:54 PM
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