Feb 5, 2008

Apple Doubles Storage Capacity of iPhone, iPod Touch



Apple has doubled the capacity of both its iPhone and iPod Touch allowing new customers to spend $100 more and get twice the storage for music, movies, pictures, and podcasts than available with previous models. Introduced today, the 32GB iPod Touch sells for $499 and the 16GB iPhone goes for $499.

Pricing on existing iPod and iPhone models stays the same. But if you're in the market for a new iPhone or iPod Touch, spending $100 more to double your capacity is a pretty good deal.

Of course the larger capacities may rile some existing iPhone and iPod Touch users as was the case when Apple dropped the price of the iPhone.

Could this be seen as another stab at the early adopters? Of course that was not Apple's intentions, but that is an obvious consequence of an upgrade of this magnitude less than a year after the initial release. But it's okay, early adopters, pull that knife out of your back and listen to what Apple has to say is the reason for the upgrade.

Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod and iPhone product marketing said in the release, "For some users, there's never enough memory." This is definitely true, especially with music collections shifting completely digital, but Greg, it still stings for those of us picked up a 16GB iPod Touch merely months ago to have a new bigger and better model become available.

It's kind of funny to think about it, but who would have thought the world would get so upset over a product improvement? Isn't that what companies are supposed to be doing?

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The high cost of e-mail autocomplete

I've always been leery of Microsoft Outlook's autocomplete feature. That's the one that guesses who you want to send the e-mail to by looking at the first few letters you type.

It's right most of the time.



But with e-mail used to send everything from jokes, to family photos to corporate secrets, "most of the time" seems like far too low a bar.

Eli Lilly and its outside lawyers found out this the hard way this week when one of the esquires sent a note intended for a colleague to a New York Times writer with the same last name. (Note: I'm not certain which e-mail program the lawyer was using, and it's supposition, though a seemingly safe bet, that some sort of autocomplete was to blame.)

The result was that confidential negotiations with the government involving as much as $1 billion quickly became nonconfidential. The Times, doing what it does, got a big scoop.

A representative for Pepper Hamilton, the law firm whose barrister sent the note, was not immediately available for comment. But, in good news for the firm, an Eli Lilly representative told Portfolio that the firm is not immediately getting the boot.

Still, that's some pretty big consequences for a feature that saves a few seconds' time. Sure, those seconds add up over time. But I imagine the lawyer in question would give any amount of time to have that e-mail back.

I try to always give my address bar a second look before hitting send, but once or twice have found my note to a colleague going to an outside contact with a similar name. Maybe Microsoft should get rid of the feature.

Then again, in a world where businesses and governments are increasingly secretive, maybe the typo has become the greatest opportunity for openness and democracy. On second thought, leave it in there.

Update: A Microsoft representative said the feature can be turned off. Here's how:

• Under the Tools menu, click Options.

• On the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.

• Select or clear the "Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields" check box.

Another suggestion comes from ClearContext VP Brad Meador, who recommends people tweak Outlook settings to delay sending e-mail for a matter of minutes. That way there's a chance to catch a broad array of mistakes before they go out forever.

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Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB Hard

If it isn't already obvious, storage space is getting to be more and more important. High definition content is using much more space than previous forms of media, and the smallish quarter terabyte drives we've been using a mere 2 years ago really won't cut it these days. In a recent review, we've pointed out that a 10 second OTA HD signal consumes about 25MB. That's 9GB gone for just one hour of recording. Despite not watching much "live" TV, I do like to record a lot of television to catch up on later and it's clear that if I want to record in HD, I'll need a lot of space.



Enough of that banter, since if you're here reading this article now, you're already aware of all of this. One terabyte drives are in full force now, and today we'll be looking at the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11. While this series of Barracudas come in a variety of capacities, we're focusing on their 1TB model.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

Like all of their consumer drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 is a standard sized 3.5" hard drive, so it should fit just fine in any internal drive bay that follows the usual IDE specifications. Below is a quick cheat sheet comparing the 7200.11 to the 7200.10 which we've looked at in the past:



The biggest change from the 7200.10 to the 7200.11 is the increase in platter size. We mentioned there will be a few capacities offered, but we can sum it up by saying that there will be 3; 500GB, 750GB and 1TB. If you're shopping for the 1TB version, another change from the previous model is the doubling of cache from 16MB to 32MB. The 500GB and 750GB will only ship with 16MB. As the name implies, the Barracuda spins its drives at 7200rpm, allowing for a sustained transfer rate of 105MB per second. Keep in mind that this is a number provided by Seagate, and we have no numbers officially regarding their earlier products.



Going back to the platter size increase we mentioned last paragraph, the easiest way to create bigger hard drives is to increase the areal density. Seagate was able to cram a lot of space into their previous 7200.10 through the use of Perpendicular Recording Technology. Perpendicular recording addresses the shortcomings of longitudinal recording by aligning the bit magnetization in a "standing" position. Seagate has already introduced this technology earlier with the Barracuda 7200.10, their Momentus 5400.3 and their Cheetah 15000.5 Enterprise drives. The Barracuda 7200.11 introduces the second generation of Perpendicular Recording where we now jump to 250GB platters.

To explain Perpendicular Recording, you can think of it this way. Magnetic recording is a lot like sewing. Think of the magnetic field from a write head as a needle, and the recording layer of a disc as the cloth you are trying to sew. The fabric is the magnetic strength of the disc and the needle is the strength of the write head (the write field) Your data is the seam in the fabric. The more stitches per inch, the more data you store. To make your data durable, you want to use a thick fabric, and a long needle, but this gets in the way of making many stitches to the inch.

In longitudinal recording, the magnetic layer (the cloth) is laid directly onto the aluminum substrate. When data is written, it is like sewing with the cloth laid flat on a table. Going flat along the table, the needle can only make stitches far apart. If you use a shorter needle, and thinner cloth, the stitches get closer together, but the seam gets weaker and weaker. When the material gets too thin, the seam tears, and the data is lost.

In perpendicular recording, a soft underlayer is put down between the substrate and the recording layer. The soft underlayer lifts the cloth off the table, letting the needle go into the cloth straight up and down. Now you can put stitches very close together, and still use a long needle, and thick cloth. Your data seam has more stitches, and it is stronger as well.

As the larger platters increase areal density, it allows Seagate to build large capacity drives with fewer platters. Few platters mean less power consumed (about 1W at idle and load according to Seagate's specs comparing the 7200.11 to the 7200.10) as well as increased performance given that the data is more tightly packed. With Seagate's SoftSonic motor and fewer platters (when compared against competitor's equivalent capacity drives), the Barracuda should be quieter as well.



The Barracuda 7200.11 is a native SATA product and supports speeds of SATA 3.0Gb/s. Unlike some of the first batches of SATA drives, a native drive will bypass the legacy Task File reads and writes, as well as avoiding the limitation of 133 Mbytes/sec for Ultra DMA Mode 6 transfers. While the 7200.11 supports SATA 3Gb/s transfer speeds, it is backwards compatible with SATA 1.5GB/s hosts. SATAII mode is also supported by the drive and it is enabled by default. Provided your motherboard supports it, it would be a good idea to leave it this way, but be sure to flip the jumper position if not. One of our forum readers in the past had an issue with a MSI P4N Diamond (no SATAII support) and a Seagate drive and changing the jumper corrected his problem of the drive not being detected.

As with all Barracudas starting with the 7200.7 series, the Barracuda 7200.11 fully supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Introduced with the Serial ATA II spec, this is a feature that can only be found in native SATA hard drives. Unlike LCQ, NCQ works by allowing a drive to process multiple commands at the same time. These commands can be rescheduled or reordered on a whim, and can also issue new requests while the drive is retrieving data from the previous request. While NCQ support is present on the drive, the controller used will also need to support NCQ in order to take advantage of it. As with the previous NCQ enabled Barracudas, the drive will work fine without an NCQ controller.

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Intel's Silverthorne, Tukwila Updates and More

Silverthorne Shapes Up

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference held at San Francisco, Intel presented 14 new technical papers that revolved around ultra mobile wireless computing, wireless radio technology standards and Tera-scale computing project. In this article, we'll be summarizing the most significant updates presented.



First up, Intel revealed more information on its processor technologies. Designed for ultra mobile computing, Intel spent a good deal of time relating how Silverthorne processors on the "Menlow" Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform are going to usher in a whole new segment of devices. Silverthorne is a low-powered Intel-Architecture (IA) processor that's derived from the Core 2 Duo desktop processor, thus conforming to the full C2D Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), but it consumes far lower power than even the ultra-low-voltage (ULV) Core Solo/Duo processor. Based on the same 45m high-K metal-gate CMOS transistor design as was the desktop Penryn processors, this 47-million transistor chip is designed for sub-1W to 2W operation - something that even the lowest powered ULV Core Solo processor cannot attain as it has trouble hitting the 5W barrier. To further conserve power, the processor uses a split I/O power supply to allow certain sections of the chip to shut down when not required. Other power management techniques incorporated is a Deep Power Down (C6) state, clock gating and power optimized register file to further curb dynamic and leakage power.



The Silverthorne is a dual-issue in-order 16-stage pipeline architecture with Hyper-threading (HT) support. Note that all current mainstream Intel processors are using out-of-order architectures, but on a processor of its scale/use and its limited resources, Intel opted for a more streamlined approach with lower analysis overhead. In case you're wondering why Hyper-threading is again making a comeback, the Silverthorne is a single-core processor and the best way to utilize its already limited resources effectively is via SMT type of Hyper-threading. Another reason HT was incorporated was because it required very little more silicon/logic to greatly increase efficiency. When HT first came to the consumer level several years ago, we've already seen its benefits of resource optimization through parallelism. This worked marvelously on single-core processors but has lost its advantage in the current multi-core processor era. As such, the Silverthorne is a single-core processor with dual-thread handling capability.

As for the status of the Silverthorne processors, Intel is already sampling them for production and their schedules are on track for introduction in the first half of this year. While Intel can't yet comment on the exact specifics of the chip details, performance at the moment is estimated to be around the same class as that of the first generation Pentium M processor (Banias core). This is based on Silverthorne's single-thread operation and it should fare slightly better with HT. Considering that Silverthorne processors are destined for ultra mobile computing devices such as UMPC-type devices and perhaps even Smartphones, that sounds like a lot of juice for very decent power draw. One of its most formidable opponents is none other than Samsung's ARM processor series, but we'll reserve true judgment when appropriate gadgets are made available utilizing the Silverthorne processor. Currently, the Intel A100 and A110 ultra mobile processors are using the Stealey core that's derived off the original Pentium M core. Silverthorne and its Menlow platform will replace them once they debut.

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