“Analysts are betting Apple’s $499 super-phone, which goes on sale June 29, and a new high-capacity [Flash-based] iPod could suck up so much cheap flash memory that it could help put free-falling prices in one of the fastest-growing slices of the semiconductor industry on pause. At least for a few months,” Brian Caulfield reports for Forbes.
“‘The iPhone is a big factor in rejuvenating a lot of the NAND market and the flash market in general,’ says Alan Niebel, chief executive officer at memory and storage researcher Web-Feet Research in Monterey, Calif.,” Caulfield reports.
“Here’s a quick calculation, courtesy of Jim Handy, an analyst with market researcher Objective Analysis. If Apple is buying between 400 million and 500 million 4 gigabit NAND flash memory chips from Samsung, as reported in the trade press, that probably represents 40% of Apple’s total orders, Handy figures. The other 60% of Apple’s business will go to Samsung’s competitors, Handy says, who control roughly the same proportion of that market,” Caulfield reports.
Caulfield reports, “That gives Apple enough memory to crank out the equivalent to between 60 million and 75 million 8-gigabyte units during the second half of this year, Handy argues, up from 30 million units during the same period last year. “
Full article here.
16GB iPod nano anyone?
No matter how good memory is, hard drives the same size will hold more data and cost less. If an iPod is going to hold my music and video library it will need a lot more than 16 GB.
Flash memory requires less power and is more stable. I’ll take longer battery and product life, thanks. I don’t need to keep everyting I have on my comp on my iPod.
well that’s why you need buy a nano and the rest of us that would like to carry our entire libraries will buy a video.
May be I need to buy some Samsung stock since APPL’s is so expensive right now, anyone know Samsung’s stock symbol?
I prefer flash over hard drives… can’t wait for the prices to become comparable…
Giga BYTE
why can NO ONE ever get this right?
In response to emax, who said anything other than giga”BYTE”?
emax:
When discussing NAND flash chips, BIT is correct, just as it is also correct when discussing bandwidth in some cases (if you ever see Mbps, that’s bits, while MBps is bytes)
One BIT is 1/8 of a BYTE. That’s why ordering 1 billion 4 gigaBIT chips (I’m using the low end of the authors figures, assuming that 400 million is 40% of Apple’s order) results in only 60-75 million 8 gigaBYTE iPods. It takes 16 4 gigaBIT chips to make one 8 gigaBYTE iPod nano. Divide 1 billion by 16, and you get…62.5 million.
Cheers.
Read the article at the top of the page, Frank.
And have a nice day.
@Bryan
I guess emax feels a little dumb right now…
i prefer gibibytes. they’re bigger.
4 Gigs of RAM is cheap now anyway, my local supermarket sell 4GB pen drives for 30 quid, I bet since the introduction of the iphone, the capacities will increase anyway.
I second the question about whether buying Samsung’s stock is a good idea. Anyone know?
This thread is dead!
“IT LIVES !!!… Mawhaaha …….”
“… Egor get off the patient now, and tidy up the lab.”