Technically Speaking

The last time I did a little piece on the iPod, MacSurfer.com got whiff of the scent and sent me an InstaLanche of visitors. The power of the electronic word can be awesome at times. Well, I’m not sure if I will be noticed similarly for this post, but that’s okay. I found, on the NY Times site, a story about the guts of an iPod. The story is very long….Now you guys hear me say this quite a bit. The story isn’t that long but it has much that I don’t really care about. Give me the facts and then I’ll move on. This story has a lot of fluff which makes it long….but it eventually gets to what the title says it is about.

Inside was a neat stack of core components. First, the power source: a slim, squarish rechargeable battery made by Sony. Atop that was the hard disk — the thing that holds all the music files. At the time, small hard disks were mostly used in laptops, or as removable data-storage cards for laptops. So-called 2.5-inch hard disks, which are protected by a casing that actually measures about 2 3/4 inches by 4 inches, were fairly commonplace, but Toshiba had come up with an even smaller one. With a protective cover measuring just over 2 inches by 3 inches, 0.2 inches thick and weighing less than two ounces, its 1.8-inch disk could hold five gigabytes of data — or, in practical terms, about a thousand songs. This is what Apple used.

On top of this hard disk was the circuit board. This included components to turn a digitally encoded music file into a conventional audio file, the chip that enables the device to use FireWire both as a pipe for digital data and battery charging and the central processing unit that acts as the sort of taskmaster for the various components. Also here was the ball-bearing construction underlying the scroll wheel. (The newer iPod models got slimmer by replacing that wheel with a solid-state version and by using a smaller battery.) It is, as Carey notes, an admirable arrangement.

There is more to this so if you are interested then go check out the article.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2003 at 10:14 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.