iPod progress

Two from iPoding:

Getting that much closer to fitting your whole collection on one iPod:

Toshiba To Release 40GB 1.8-inch HDD

The Toshiba Storage Device Division products page now lists a 40GB version of the 1.8-inch disk drive found in iPod. ...the 40GB drive will have the same physical dimensions as the 20GB version in current iPods.

I think 40GB would finally be enough for a good, solid, varied portable collection. Now if it were just $99... </dream>

Echo May Make In-Store Downloads To iPod

The New York Times reports .. that six music retailers, including Best Buy, Virgin Entertainment Group and Tower Records, have joined forces to sell downloadable music.
"The retailers could also enable customers to download music in stores using portable devices, like the Apple iPod. 'No one has really marketed these services,' Mr. Hart of Echo said."

<hedleylamarr>Kinky!</hedleylamarr>  

 Apple announcements

Yeah yeah, new cheaper better PowerMacs, whatever. But dropping the price on the 23" LCD mega-display from $3500 to $2000? That's progress. I could see getting the new 20" LCD in a couple of years at this rate. Yay, capitalism.

MacCentral has a good summary of the announcements.  

 More bigger room for bigger better stuff

The other night I saw that APS Technologies is carrying external LaCie drives of 400GB and 500GB. I thought we were just now getting to 250GB in a drive; how the heck is LaCie doing 500GB? It doesn't say that it's two drives in one case, and the dimensions don't seem to support that guess.

Anyway, we're reaching another point where we will think of storage differently; I know it changed my outlook when I was able to buy a 20GB external drive, and we now store our entire music collection on a 60GB drive; that was unthinkable to me back when drives were 80MB or even 800MB. Ars Technica contemplates one difference 250GB could make:

250 GB ought to be enough for anybody

At this rate, who needs MP3 anymore? Why not just rip straight to .WAV? Or, even better, rip your CDs twice: once to .WAV for playing on your home machine, and once to MP3 for your portable.

One thing's for sure; FireWire 800 is going to be important to the large-storage market. Is there a USB 3.0 coming down the line too? I'm out of that loop...     1 comment(s)  

I make backups of irreplaceable music using FLAC, a free lossless audio compression format. It gets between 2:1 and 4:1. http://flac.sourceforge.net/
      ...posted by Seth on February 1, 2003 3:49 PM

Add a comment...