With their usual amalgam of surgical precision, egghead obsessiveness and rock star attitude, the boys at iFixIt have sliced into the last of Apple’s new iPods: the touchscreen iPod nano. And, like we thought, it’s really more of a Shuffle with a screen than a nano with multitouch.
It’s the claims of multitouch that really sticks in the iFixIt boys’ craws: they claim, rightly, that multitouch is officially determined by being able to detect and resolve a minimum of three touch points, where as the nano only employs two… and even then, only for rotating the display, “although how anyone is supposed to comfortably fit more than one finger on the display is a mystery.”
Other interesting facts: the battery is twice the capacity of the Shuffle’s to power the screen, and the display has the most dense packing of pixels this side of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 or iPod Touch. Additionally, the glass on the touch isn’t quite flush with the case, but sticks out 0.3mm due to the size of the headphone jack. It’s a pretty interesting commentary on how tiny and compact the innards of the new nano are when the headphone jack is one of the thickest components… and perhaps how anal Apple is about device thinness when they’d rather the glass protrude from their device minutely than minutely expand the body.
You can find iFixIt’s full teardown here.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
