| Thursday, June 3, 2004 |
17:54 - Toshiba Pulls an ATI
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/toshiba.html
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They're calling it "The Toshiba Blunder":
A story by IDG News Service reports that the deputy manager of Toshiba's Digital Media Network hard disk drive division technical department confirmed at a computer convention in Taiwan that the company plans to launch a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch drive in the coming months and that Apple has committed to buying the drive for use in one of its own products.
Deputy Manager Cindy Lee is reported to have said the drive will be in mass production in July or August. Although the story doesn't quote Lee directly, it leaves few details to the imagination that a new drive is coming soon and Apple will be using it in future iPods; Apple doesn't use Toshiba's miniature drives in anything but iPods.
Sources inside Apple confirmed late Wednesday that company executives are wondering, "what the hell happened? This is a major !@#$&* up and you don't have to be a genius to figure out what is coming next from Apple," said one source close to the iPod maker. "Apple is trying to get answers from Toshiba, but it appears they are just as in the dark as to what happened. Apple is not happy."
I'm sure we all remember what happened when ATI pulled a stunt like this; RADEON cards were yanked from Macs for months. We were all quite impressed with Steve when, at the flat-panel iMac's January 2002 introduction, he didn't sic his hounds on Time Canada for breaking the story a day early. But then, Time isn't exactly a strategic partner with Apple.
Ah well. 60-gig iPods? As the rest of the market insistently pursues the notion that "cheaper is better", Apple continues to leap for capacity as the primary driver. Market share seems to be bearing out their gamble. And it's not like news of an upcoming 60-gigger is likely to have too big an impact on people who buy iPods to match the size of their current music collections (the smaller-sized iPods are still selling briskly, including the 4-gig mini). But the fact that Apple's essentially driving the whole bleeding edge of the small hard drive industry through the iPod definitely means they see value in increasing iPod capacity without bound.
60 gigs is an awful lot of music, though. You don't suppose Steve plans to put other kinds of stuff on this fall's iPod range, do you?
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Brian Tiemann
