Apple: Touchscreen iPod Nano Does Not Run iOS

John Brownlee ()

Apple: Touchscreen iPod Nano Does Not Run iOS

Apple’s sexily diminutive new iPod Nano, replete with 1.13-inch touchscreen, certainly looks like iOS. It might even — held close enough to the nostrils — smell like iOS. But it’s nothing of the sort.

Backstage at today’s iPod Event, an Apple spokesman confirmed that the new iPod Nano is not running iOS.

That makes sense, given Jobs’ own failure to identify the Nano as a new iOS-driven device, or his failure to brag about a wide range of apps to run on the device. It also makes sense from the engineering perspective of trying to shove a chip powerful enough to run a current version of iOS into a Shuffle-sized footprint.

Rather, what we see in the new Nano is a skin layered most probably over the traditional iPod Nano operating system, with some of iOS multitouch software scraped out and grafted onto it.

The move makes sense for Apple. The new Nano is too small to really avail itself of multitouch, but iOS is Apple’s sexiest operating system, as well as one synonymous with touch. Apple couldn’t well make a touchscreen iPod at this point without making it at least look like iOS.

DON'T MISS

We wonder, though, if confusion will ultimately set in. If it looks like iOS, but doesn’t run apps, isn’t that going to confuse customers? We imagine that in the brainpan of one Apple Store Genius is throbbing with premonitory headache right now.

10 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in iPod, News, Top stories | Tagged: , , , |

  • A reader

    Yeah. I REALLY want to run iWork on the new nano. ;-)

    The inability to run iOS apps on a nano is not a deal-breaker. Most consumers won’t even think about running anything other than the included apps.

  • Really?

    Next year the design will be different and it will have a virtual click wheel.

  • Ben

    They’re not calling it iOS because it’s obviously a little altered, but I guarantee it’s the same basic OS. I give it two months before it’s jailbroken. The only question is whether the scrolling “app” view is a version of SpringBoard. If it is, we should have Cydia on there with a bunch of tiny apps in no time. Unfortunately, it probably isn’t SpringBoard, so it’ll take a little longer.

  • Susan

    The previous two nanos had the same processor as the iPod touch 2G, which runs iOS. They only had 32 and 64MB of RAM respectively however. iOS can run in 64MB of RAM if all the background processes (Phone, Safari, Mail) weren’t there.

    They carefully state it doesn’t run iOS to avoid artificially inflating the number of devices that developers believe they are developing for.

  • Susan

    They carefully state it doesn’t run iOS to avoid artificially inflating the number of devices that developers believe they are developing for.

  • AdamC

    Is it a big deal?

    Yea I see envy all over the article, the envy of not able to create anything of substance but only bad mouth other people’s effort.

  • NT

    “Most consumers won’t even think about running anything other than the included apps.”

    Well my first reaction was “can I load apps on it”. I was thinking of all those “pocket reference” apps — vocabulary flashcards, API header lists etc — and thinking about squeezing them into the tiniest weightless package imaginable.

  • JeeBee

    I’m sure it’s running a variant of iOS, just one that will never be exposed to developers, probably with a custom variant of Cocoa Touch with optimisations for a tiny screen, with custom apps for that tiny screen. It’s probably still running on an ARM11 based Samsung chip though, rather than the A4. Can’t wait for the teardowns of all the new devices.

  • cprail

    Just like the original Apple TV isn’t officially a mac, it still runs a modified version of Tiger…

  • Dennis Digwstive

    The other iPods can run games purchased off of a special section of the app store. Maybe this can too.