24 hours with the new ipod

**moav** · May 4th, 2003, 12:59 PM

Just wanted to get peoples impressions of the new ipod.

Overall, in this day an age it's a 5/5. Tomorrow of course as with any product it will seem dated. The only gripes I have from the old form factor is that the hold button is difficult to access. The next version should do away with it completely and instead use the middle scroll wheels touch center to activate and deactivate. Three taps puts it on hold three consecutive taps turns hold off. The only other way would be to put the slider on the side so your thumb could activate it. Right now being on the top and being so small you really can't activate it without your index finger but my index finger can't exert enough pressure on it especially after a hard run and it becomes to slipper to use. Maybe it will loosen up a bit with more use.

Secondly, the more I use any form of portable player there are times when I really don't want to have my headphones on. I wish they could figure out a way to put a single speaker in the unit. Yes, the sound wouldn't be that great but I'm getting annoyed of wearing sound muffling earphones all the time. When I'm at home I can just plug the line in to the stereo but other times if we are out and about or others want to listen it becomes a pain.

At first I thought I would hate the placement of the buttons. However, they actually seem easier to use then the old buttons around the wheel. It seems that I have less thumb strain using these since I have less thumb travel then with the old model. I do not like the indentation of the buttons though. There is a hard lip surrounding the buttons. I think Apple could have made them a little bigger and had a slight curve bevel into the indentation.

I'm not sure about others ipod's but I really feel a bit cheated. When I go out and purchase a 15 gig ipod I expect pretty darn close to 15 gigs. The operating system is not OS X that is installed into this baby. When checking out the status for the first time when i got it out of the box it only stated that 12.4 gigs where available. That is crazy. I'm not installing oracle 9i into this thing. So, Apple where is my missing, almost 2 gigs?

Otherwise great job Apple keep up the good work and hopefully in 6 months things will be even closer to perfection and i can help the economy out a little more. Until then I have some music to listen to.

**mr. k** · May 4th, 2003, 01:07 PM

computers to that to almost any hd, i have a 40 gb and it says that there is only 38 when i get info on it. the fact that there is only 12.4 on it is kind of suprising - that's more then 2gb missing where on my 40gb there is about 2gb missing. anyone know why?

**~~NeYo~~** · May 4th, 2003, 10:14 PM

Weird ... my Cube's hard Drive loses 9Gb of the 120Gb quota .. so for it to be 8 times smaller, and lose almost a 1/3rd as much is Crazy! ..hmmm... maybe the iPod OS is Totally bloated! lol ... does it have M$ Paint, MovieMaker :P haha

**senne** · May 5th, 2003, 07:01 AM

a file on a 120GB HD will be bigger than the same file on a 60GB HD

So your Mac OS X System on a 120GB HD will also be bigger in size than on a 60GB HD.

**Rhino_G3** · May 5th, 2003, 11:05 AM

the advertised size of a HD is normaly "pre-format" When formatting a disk it takes up space that could potentialy be used for data storage. I'm sure that with the 15 gig pod they're basing the size of the advertised size of the HD.

**lurk** · May 5th, 2003, 12:17 PM

Another problem is that disks are sold in Marketing Megabytes (or gigabytes) which is just 10^6 and not 2^20 or so you loose about 4% in the case of Megabytes. In the GB case it is 10^9 instead of 2^30 which turns into about a 7% loss.

Once you slap the HD into your computer the computer will report its size using the 2^30 number as god intended. So taking that and the fact that drives are labeled with unformatted sizes it is easy to see that amount of shrinkage.

Once again the skew between marketing and reality

**stokini** · May 5th, 2003, 03:23 PM

No, the real answer is explained in this Apple Knowledge Base article:

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In iPod's About menu, the hard disk size is reported as 4.6 GB or 9.2 GB. The same is true if you connect iPod to your computer in FireWire disk mode and Choose Get Info (Mac OS 9) or Show Info (Mac OS X) from the File menu. The technical specification for iPod says that is has a 5 GB or 10 GB hard disk (See Note 2.)

Why the difference? Most hard disk manufacturers measure disk size this way: 1 MB = 1 million bytes (1000 * 1000). A 5 GB hard disk, therefore, is one that holds 5 billion bytes. Computers, including the Macintosh and iPod, measure disk size this way: 1 MB = 1 048 576 bytes (1024 * 1024). The difference in these two calculations is what causes the disk to appear as 4.6 GB or 9.2 GB on a computer, but actually be a 5 billion byte or 10 billion byte hard disk.