Unbundling

[mmcirvin]

As long as I'm talking about iPods, I ought to note that Apple's vaunted iPod price cuts of the past week are, at least in part, actually unbundlings in much the spirit of the Mac mini (it looks to me as if the value for money really has improved, but this needs to be kept in mind). You don't get as many accessories as you used to. Whether this will bother you depends on how much you want them. It does seem to be a pattern in recent Apple product evolution: they introduce many new models as luxurious bundles (getting the accessories some popular exposure) and then pull accessories out of the bundle later to bring list prices down.

The iPod minis don't even ship with a power brick ($29) any more, which I'd personally find pretty annoying, since in my experience you don't want to be stuck charging only from your computer, even if you can (though I've also heard that the battery life of the recent models is way, way up, so maybe it's not as crucial to have AC charging handy in a pinch).

They now ship with a USB 2.0 cable but no FireWire cable ($19), which makes good bottom-line sense but is bound to cause feelings of abandonment among Mac users, since Apple was late in acknowledging USB 2.0's existence and only relatively new Macs have it (mine doesn't). Expect somebody in the John C. Dvorak mold to tout this as evidence that Apple is discontinuing the Macintosh.

I know the price of the Dock Connector-to-FireWire cable because the lovely samantha2074 just bought me a second one, so I can carry one for use with the power brick and keep the other attached to my machine (I don't have the Dock). This is nice.

Comments

[rms2.livejournal.com]

http://daringfireball.net/2005/02/firewire_hysteria (http://daringfireball.net/2005/02/firewire_hysteria)

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Fair enough on the Firewire cable unbundling, but I think the fretting over the iPod shuffle only supporting FAT32 formatting is a bit much. Apple certainly didn't design the iPod (the shuffle model, especially) to serve as portable data volumes; they're music players foremost. Data transport is a bonus feature.

(Also, only 4 of the 11 characters that Apple's Knowledgebase says are forbidden in FAT32 filenames actually are, and there's 5 other forbidden characters that do exist but aren't listed.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I know there are people who use both Macs and PCs who intentionally keep their iPods formatted in FAT32, because it works on both systems, whereas HFS+ is Mac only.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here's one: The unbundling of the FireWire cable could mean Apple is switching to Intel! (http://www.spymac.com/news/index.php?contentid=1941) It's a little like Kremlinology.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Another point about unbundling: if you're replacing your old gizmo that used the same accessories, you don't care.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

Are iPod Firewire cables generic, or iPod-specific? Could I use any old Firewire cable I have laying around?

[rms2.livejournal.com]

The first- and second-generation iPods had a standard firewire connector, but the newer ones (including the iPod Mini) have a "dock connector", which mates to the docking base and provides both USB and FireWire, so you need a special cable, or an adapter like the PocketDock (http://www.sendstation.com/).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing about the dock connector is that in addition to power and data it provides an audio line out, which does not go through the headphones' volume control. This was designed so that the iPod Dock can provide a convenient means of connecting to external speakers, but it is great for car audio too. My car CD player is old and lame, but Sam managed to get a car stereo with aux input, and she has a Belkin gadget plugged into the cigarette lighter that has a cable to the aux input and a Dock Connector cable sticking out. Plug the iPod in once and you've got power from the cigarette lighter and audio going to the car stereo.

While this is considerably rocking, the only other thing you need for maximum rocking is a DJ in the passenger seat, preferably someone who will not give you the urge to kill while driving.