A new product, iPod shuffle was launched in the month of January 2005. This product doesn't require a dock connector for plugging in into an USB port. It is also independent of FireWire services.

iPod Nano was launched in the month of September 2005. It has a dock connector which allows the plugging in of a FireWire cable for charging. However data cannot be transferred. However Apple eliminated FireWire support from all its iPods with the launch of the fifth generation iPod's.

The dock connector of the fifth generation iPod can also draw support from FireWire cable. However data transfer will be possible only with USB and not with FireWire.
The information is present on the screen of the iPod.

However this has lead to some negative comments from the Mac community. FireWire has always been associated with Apple Macs whereas USB became a part of it only since
October 2005.

Two ARM 7TDMI derived CPUs were used by the first three generations of iPod. They ran at 90 MHz. However the newer models run at speed of 80 MHz. this is done to preserve the life of the battery.

The hard drives of iPod are 1.8 inch ATA drives developed by Toshiba. The hard drives of iPod mini are Compact Flash microdrive (1 inch) manufactured by Hitachi. This drive has a ROM chip (32 MiB) and it has a program called bootloader. This program instructs the device on loading the operating system from some other medium.

All iPod's have 32 MiB of RAM except for the fifth generation 60 GB ones. The RAM has a part of OS which is loaded from firmware. This helps in caching songs which are loaded from other sources like the hard drive.

An iPod can copy and store 30 MiB songs into RAM (on a playlist). This will be done by spinning the hard disk only once. It will thus save power and increases the battery life.

iPod's came only in white and black display when they were introduced. However no such model is available nowadays. Color screen was introduced with the launch of iPod Photo. iPod shuffle which was launched in January 2005 doesn't even have a screen!

iPod Nano has a color screen and also photo capability. All the fifth generation iPods have photo capability and color screens.