This is a 4gb 1st generation silver Apple ipod mini. I bought it in about 2004. I used it for many years and in about 2007 I replaced the "irreplaceable" battery. The new battery worked very well until about 2009 when the battery exploded which pushed out from the inside and broke the LCD screen from the pressure. In 2007 I was able to open the ipod seamlessly, however since the exploded battery made an evident bouldge to the ipod case, i had to break open the case this time as there was no movement at all to slide it. The Ipod mini case is a very thin 1mm or less aluminum extrusion.
The components inside the ipod are the white click wheel centre. the small 4gb microdrive HDD to the left. above the HDD is the battery. And to the right is the screen attached to the chipset.
I thought it was interesting that the Micro drive was wrapped in a silicone skin. This presumably is to stop skipping in the hard drive, as it is a mechanical storage device that uses a physical spinning disk it is obsolete technology now that solidstate flash storage is prevalent. Note: while using the ipod I never noticed any skipping.
Microdrive without its silicone skin.
The HDD was connected to the motherboard through copper wires at the top of the device
The clickwheel is merely a series of buttons as well as the touch control surface which i believe to be a circuit that is closed by contact of the skin.
This look like serial ports that transferred data throggh the ipod.
This is the hard drive controller. Cache and other features would be located on this board
The Hard drive had to be broken open as it was sealed using three star screws. the microdrive is exactly the same as a normal hard drive but just scaled down.
I believe this to be one of the most complex parts of the HDD as its is the smallest manufacturing miniturisation I have ever seen.
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