The iPod is perhaps one of the best known and loved gadgets of the decade and one of the main reasons for its success is its ease of use. If you are thinking about purchasing an iPod or already own one and interested in how it works, here is some insightful information.

The Apple iPod can fit many hours of music on one small device because it uses codecs that compress MP3's or other compatible types of digital music formats. Codecs stand for compression decompression algorithms and are formulas that allow you to shrink the size of large files into very small and manageable files. The Apple iPod has a digital audio chip (DAC) that is able to read these shrunken files and create high quality audio files which are transmitted to the ear phones.

One of the reasons that the iPod is so popular is its sleek and simple design and easy to use functionality. Most people love the features of the iPod which can be attributed to specific components of hardware. They include storage, battery and click wheel.

Storage

Miniature hard drives can be smaller than 2 inches and fit as much as 80 gigabytes of data, making it extremely easy to store your entire music collection and download several full length motion pictures. On smaller sized units such as the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle a different type of storage media is used, it is called flash memory. This type of storage unit usually holds from 1 to 8 GB of data. The advantage of using flash memory is that it is even smaller than miniature hard drives and extremely thin, allowing an even smaller device to be created.