The iPod touch and its relationship with the iPhone has always been a little more complicated than just “one has a cellular radio”. In some ways, the new iPod touch nearly measures up to the iPhone 5, while a number of other choices (like the amount of RAM and the A5 SoC) make it clear that the iPod touch will always be playing second fiddle. Last week, we talked a little about the hardware in the new iPod touch, but one missing component slipped our attention; as it turns out, Apple has stripped the latest iPod touch of its ambient light sensor.

As a result, users will have to keep manually adjusting screen brightness to accommodate for changes to the light level of their surroundings.

This might not seem like an issue at all if the iPod touch simply never had such a sensor, but it had been present on previous hardware, only to disappear with the most recent generation.

Was Apple just trying to keep costs down? That’s the most likely explanation, but it’s not like simple light sensors are very expensive components; are Apple’s margins lower than we thought?

Source: GigaOM