the iPod mini is gone. Not that I miss it. I never thought it was particularly cool looking, at least not compared to a 3g or 4g full-size model. The pastel colors and all - no.
Anyway, its replacement, launched this week, ditched the hard drive and went to flash. It’s little, and just about exactly what the iPod Shuffle wanted to be. Plus, they finally made an iPod available in black. (Don’t even start, that U2 piece of shit didn’t count.)
It’s a cool looking little machine, but it doesn’t have enough storage. The 4GB model (there is also a 2GB) costs a whopping $249. The 20GB full sized version is only $299. That’s quite a few more songs. I know well that 4GB is not enough for a hardcore iPodder; my trusty 3g 10GB version is painfully small these days. Also, it says on the Apple site that you need “a Mac with built-in USB 2.0″ - built-in USB 2? I wonder if it really won’t work with an add-on card. That would make it a ton more expensive for me. My guess is that they skipped FireWire due to the size of the connector. It’s also small and light enough to go right into the washing machine in a pocket.
September 13th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
so apparently, you can use a FireWire cable, since it has the dock connector from the last couple of versions, but it will not sync over FireWire. lame.
September 14th, 2005 at 5:22 am
So what a minute….you can use Firewire, but not for syncing? What do you use it for then?
September 14th, 2005 at 9:35 am
Well, I assume that you can still mount it as a hard drive, and if so that would be one fast little 4gb storage device.
And perhaps, you can still drag songs onto the iPod through FireWire….I’m not a sync-er myself, I do it all manually.
No fucking idea, really though. I’ll go harass the people at the local Apple outlet.
September 14th, 2005 at 11:00 am
If any of my libraries on any of my machines were under 20 gbs…I can see that syncing would be handy. But they’re not. And considering ID3 information is always screwed w/ newly aquired stuff…manual is the way to go.