Apple readies Mac OS X-based iPods?
Revamp could come next month, moles maintain
Apple's iPod line-up will be revamped next month, it has been claimed, and the biggest change of all will be the replacement of the players' operating system with a version of Mac OS X, as per the iPhone.
The scheme - announced by company sources cited by AppleInsider - will see the original iPod OS, based on technology from Pixo, then an independent company set up by ex-Apple employee Paul Mercer, but now part of Sun, replaced by Mac OS X's Unix kernel.
What that means for the music player's icon user interface remains to be seen. Certainly, there have been rumours doing the rounds for some time that Apple would equip the iPod with the iPhone UI's look and feel, and a shift to Mac OS X would go most of the way to making that possible.
In addition to the Mac and the iPhone, Apple also equips its AppleTV set-top box with Mac OS X.
Earlier this week, it was claimed that the iPod Nano will take on the look of the current iPod - albeit in a smaller form - while the iPod will acquire a look not unlike that of the iPhone.
COMMENTS
and will it...
have a built in alarm clock, calculator, and maybe even a phone - or is that the iPhone?
If it wakes me up, makes me a cup of coffee and shows me the news on my bus to work, I'll be happy, as long as I can take pictures and look at them on the way home...
Battery
Hmmm, audio playback on the current iPhone lasts for 24 hours, a greater length of time than the Video iPods reported audio playback time of 20 hours. So, not sure where the sudden knicker twisting on battery life is coming from, it surely will be even better if the next iPod is designed on a stripped down iPhone?
Oh great
A device whose functionality is I/O bound is being ported to an OS with crappy I/O and threading performance.
The most important thing to me in a player behind capacity is battery life. Goodbye, iPod.
So where will that leave Creative?
If the user interface of the newer iPods changes substantially from the older ones, will this signal the end of the revenue stream to Creative Technologies?
Perhaps this will be the final nail in their coffin–what they have done to their musical instrument brands (E-mu and Ensoniq) is nearly criminal.
OS X
The iPhone runs (according to crash dumps and poking around on it) runs “OS X” not “Mac OS X”: “Mac OS X” is really supposed to be only for Macs, although the Apple TV does run a variant.
