This made me laugh today — Slashdot posted a correction claiming the iPod will ship with a 10 gig hard drive rather than a 5 gig hard drive as has been widely reported. Too bad they didn’t bother to read the technical specifications web page that Apple has up clearly noting that the unit will feature a 5 gig HD. Tell me again why I’d pay a subscription fee for such information.
This part didn’t make me laugh though. The New York Times confirms what The Register had suggested — the iPod will ship with copy protection which will prevent some, but not all copying. According to the Times,
Mr. Jobs said the company had taken some steps to protect against piracy in its device. For instance, he said, songs loaded onto the iPod from a Macintosh computer, cannot then be loaded from the device to a different Macintosh computer, a step he said would make it difficult for people to distribute music they own to other users.
As far as I can tell from reading between the lines, the iPod will work as a normal Firewire hard drive, but any MP3s transferred to the unit via iTunes will be placed in a special area of the hard drive where they cannot be transferred. MP3s can be copied onto the iPod using normal file copy methods, but those MP3s apparently cannot be played on the machine.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. This thing is scheduled for November, and I suspect someone will have a workaround for the copy protection before the New Year.