The Apple Rumor Mill Churns

Apple has garnered an almost cult following from the release of it’s first Macintosh and that infamous commercial in 1984. A number of magazines devoted solely to the Mac following are published, from MacWorld to MacAddict. And the Internet has evolved, taking the Mac fanatic with it. In the beginning there were just a few Mac rumors sites, and most of them had legitimate connections inside Apple corporate and you could find some great information on these websites. They really used to know what was going on way before the public did.

Now there are literally hundreds of these sites plastered over the Internet. There are even sites that aggregate the information from other Apple rumors sites. And when you combine that with Apple’s now-large (and still growing) popularity, and sprinkle on a little non-disclosure thanks to Reg. FD, you’re left with nonsense. The Apple rumor mill is churning as hard as ever, but it is difficult to filter out what is meaningful with the sheer amount of information, mostly false and even absurd, available. And so, as we await the arrival of the Video iPod, I thought this would be a good time to discuss what's expected of it (and in it) and when.

Apple has made it no secret that the current high-end iPod is a transitional item to help bridge the gap between portable audio and video. Though it’s called the iPod Video by many, Apple doesn’t refer to it as such; they still just call it an iPod. Apple has always pushed the envelope with its products, and in the case of some (think the Newton) has brought them to market too quickly. Steve Jobs has done an excellent job of judging market acceptance, as is evident with his timing of the iPod. Apple is thinking along those same lines about the upcoming Video iPod, which will be a device meant for watching videos and full-length feature films, also capable of storing a ton of music. The screen is going to be much larger than the current iPod, as will the storage capacity. Apple will have to stick with a hard drive-based system for the Video iPod, simply because Flash memory is just still too expensive per byte.

With every iPod ever released, minus the Shuffle, Apple has used a product from PortalPlayer for the CPU and Audio Decoder. It was announced just last week, though, that Apple is going to drop PortalPlayer chips from “its new mid-range and high-end flash-based iPods.” With iPod Nano sales representing 70% of PortalPlayer’s bottom line, PLAY has taken a huge hit on the news. The press release notes, however, that PortalPlayer believes the their chip “will continue to be used in other members of the iPod family.” The most likely successor for the chips in Apple’s flash iPod line is SigmaTel, who has a commanding share of the flash mp3 player market and already provides the chipset for the iPod Shuffle. Other possible successors include Samsung, Actions, and LSI Logic.

Though PortalPlayer claims that their product will continue to be used somewhere in the iPod line, I can’t see why this would be the case. The video decoder chip in the current iPod, the processor that deals with pictures and video is made by Broadcom. This very same chipset, the VideoCore 2724, is capable of the very same mp3 and AAC audio decoding that is accomplished by the PortalPlayer chip. Perhaps Apple kept PortalPlayer’s product in the current iPod for the sake of expediency and getting the device to market, but I can’t see why they would keep their chipset in a fully re-designed iPod model. The Broadcom chip is also capable of video resolution up to 640x480, twice as large as the current iPod display and certainly enough for a full-screen iPod.

The biggest hurdle that Apple has encountered with the Video iPod is the user interface. How do you create a compact device with large screen and a user interface? The answer appears to be to combine the two; make the user interface part of the screen. Rumors of a “touch-screen” iPod interface have been floating around the web for quite some time, but Apple appears to have made quite a bit of headway in the process, as evidenced by a patent filed by the company in early February that describes the system in detail, in addition to applications for the touch screen in a tablet PC. Cypress Semi’s touch-sensitive system used in the current iPod scroll-wheel will likely be scrapped for the Transparent Capacitive Position Sensing product from Syanaptics for the touch screen.

So where, you ask, is this Video iPod if Apple is so far along with it? Rumor has it that Apple encountered a number of issues with the “virtual track wheel”, as it is being called, and has scrapped the current version for another solution. And just as important, Apple has yet to strike a deal with any of the large movie studios, something Apple wants (and needs) to have in place before the Video iPod can be a success. They’ve made some inroads towards these deals, and are in a good position to strike them with a few studios, but we’ll have to leave that for another article. For now, we’ll just say that Apple is most likely going to have to push the release of the Video iPod back to the back-to-school season, if not the holidays.