Ah, iFixit, the company that loves tearing down anything from Apple as soon as it hits the market. They’ve already pried apart the brand new iPod nano and iPod touch and posted their pictorial walkthroughs for all to see. Apparently, the iPod classic is not even interesting enough to warrant being taken apart these days.
Usually, this would be the end of this post, with a quip about how nerdy you must be to enjoy looking at unflattering photographs of the insides of consumer electronics. However, the iPod touch disassembly became a little more interesting when they ran into a component that had no business being there. To know what it was, tune in to MacUser at the same time and in the same place next week!
Or, well, after the jump.
Bah, who has that sort of patience? Well, it turns out that there’s a Bluetooth chip inside the iPod touch (v2.1 + EDR, to be specific) and, if I remember correctly, that wasn’t advertised at all. Could this be another case of Apple sneaking in disabled hardware components in advance and then activating them through a software update later? Does Apple plan to enable A2DP audio streaming on these iPod touches in future?
Yeah, you wish! Turns out that the Bluetooth chip in question is there for a reason, and a well advertised one at that—Nike+iPod. This chip is the reason why the iPod touch can interface with Nike+ receivers without requiring an external dongle and its absence is (supposedly) what prevents iPhones and first generation iPod touches from doing so.
In other words, there’s not going to be A2DP streaming goodness for any member of Apple’s current iPod lineup anytime soon. Sorry, but that’s just the way it’s gonna be. So how about them photos of logic boards and chipsets and screws? Pretty impressive, huh?
[via MacRumors]
The iPhone has that chip or its equivalent. Remember Bluetooth headsets?
That must be the Nike+ chip that was announced on the Keynote. Before, you had to plug in the chip to talk to the shoe, but on the keynote apple announced that it was now internal.
Someday we'll have wireless music/video syncing.
I'm betting the reason we don't is because of the stupid user holdup. Or that they could make it work on the mac nicely but not on the PC.
C'est la vie.
Link33
Well, at the moment Bluetooth would be awfully slow for syncing music/video, as 2.1 tops out at 3Mbps (vs. USB 2.0's 480Mbps). Wi-Fi syncing would be more practical, but even that would be a lot slower than USB, as 802.11g is just 54Mbps.