Apple Announces New iPod Touch: A10 SoC Inside

It’s been 4 years since Apple last updated the iPod lineup with the 6th generation iPod Touch in 2015. Today Apple did the unexpected and released a hardware refresh of the dedicated media player.

In an age where everybody uses their phones as music and media players, I think it’s fair to say that the market for dedicated devices such as iPods has shrunk quite a lot. Nevertheless, Apple wants to cover this niche with the new iPod Touch and advertises it as the cheapest iOS device one can get.

The new iPod touch is now powered by Apple’s A10 chipset and features the same 4” 1136 x 640 pixel display as its predecessor, promising a relatively meagre 800:1 contrast ratio and a 500cd/m² maximum brightness.

One great benefit of going for an iPod Touch is the fact that it’s almost half the weight of modern smartphones. At 88g it’s a relatively featherweight device.

Other than the SoC, the only other apparent upgrade to the hardware is the addition of 802.11ac WiFi, although Bluetooth remains at version 4.1.

Apple has also upgraded the storage option, but disappointingly the smallest model is still only 32GB and comes at a price point of $199. Upsell variants at 128GB and 256GB come at $299 and $399.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

Image
Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series (codenamed Kittson) processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabilities not found on Xeon pr
Read more

Intel Axes 10nm CPU Based NUC

Image
Intel has notified its partners about plans to discontinue its only 10nm small form factor NUC in the market. The NUC, which went under the code name of Crimson Canyon, is/was Intel's only 10nm device in this market - it used Cannon Lake processors made on its 10 nm technology, and paired with AMD’s Radeon 540 graphics.  The fate of Intel’s Cannon Lake processors has been, to put it mildly, 'dead on arrival'. Delayed by over a year because of problems with 10 nm fabrication process, the CPUs suffered low yields and had design selections made that resulted in a non-functioning integrated GPU, as well as high power consumption: the Core i3-8121U processor at the heart of Intel's first generation 10nm ended up in a few China-only laptops ( which we reviewed ), and in a small number of Crimson Canyon NUC devices. Intel advises parties interested in its Crimson Canyon NUC SFF PCs to make their final orders by December 27, 2019, or return them by that date. The f
Read more

TeamGroup T-Force Xcalibur ARGB DDR4-4000 at Computex

Image
At Computex 2019, TeamGroup unveiled a couple of new products aimed at users looking for high-end components. One of these was its refreshed T-Force Xcalibur DDR4 memory now with addressable ARGB LEDs. During CES 2019, TeamGroup announced a set of ASRock Phantom Gaming branded Xcalibur RGB modules , fast forward to Computex 2019, TeamGroup had its new T-Force Xcalibur ARGB on display with the new ARGB heatsinks modelled over a high-end kit of DDR4-4000 Samsung B-Die based memory kit. The T-Force Xcalibur ARGB memory is very similar in design to the previous special edition Xcalibur RGB modules, but with new addressable RGB LEDs which seems to be the new market trend for gaming-focused brands. Each heatsink has a black aluminium finish with the Xcalibur and T-Force logos, with the 120 degrees angled lighting coming from the light bar at the top of the module which includes an Aztec inspired patterning. While TeamGroup only had a DDR4-4000 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) kit on displa
Read more