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A voyage inside the iPod Shuffle |
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Saturday, 26 February 2005 |
A voyage inside the iPod Shuffle
ZDNet
A look under the hood of Apple Computer's iPod Shuffle shows the company is
making music with two chips.
IDC analyst IdaRose Sylvester recently dissected a 512MB iPod Shuffle, purchased
at retail, to determine what the tiny music player is made of. Her report,
published earlier this month, reveals that Apple used two main chips spread over
two separate circuit boards to foster the compact design of the music player,
which was introduced in January.
The Shuffle Sylvester dismantled was based around an MP3 decoder chip from
SigmaTel and a flash memory chip from Samsung--which means the device uses many
fewer chips than hard-drive-based iPods, she wrote.
The MP3 decoder, mounted to one board, takes charge of a multitude of functions.
Its handles music, including the playing of MP3, AAC and Audible format files.
It harbors a USB 2.0 converter, SDRAM for buffering data and a headphone driver.
The chip is capable of handling Windows Media music file decoding and voice
recording, and could send images to an LCD screen and work with an FM tuner, she
wrote. Those features go unused in the Shuffle, though.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 01 March 2005 )
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