“A global shortage of traditional, spinning hard disk drives has coincidentally come at a time when Apple’s flash-based solid-state MacBook Air is one of the company’s most popular products,” Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider.
“The success of the redesigned MacBook Air has come with ‘fortuitous timing’ in the face of the hard drive shortage, analyst Rob Cihra with Evercore said in a note issued to investors on Monday,” Hughes reports. “He believes Apple is largely insulated from the ongoing component constraints, caused by flooding in Thailand that has affected hard drive makers Western Digital and Seagate.”
Hughes reports, “Apple’s MacBook Air features only NAND flash for storage, relying on solid-state hard drives rather than traditional spinning hard disk drives. NAND memory has been unaffected by the floods in Thailand… Cihra expects Apple to counter with a refresh of its MacBook Air lineup in the first half of 2012. He also believes that the company’s cash hoard will allow it to leverage ‘some unique NAND engineering/supply vs. vanilla (solid-state drives).'”
Read more in the full article here.
It is so nice to be ahead in this game.
I don’t think Apple would have anything to worry about either way.
Even with diminished supply of Hard Drives, the manufacturing capacity that remains is going to go to the big customers first, and Apple would def rank up there as a big customer for hard drives.
The only people feeling the pain from all of this are consumers, guys like us who might want a couple of TB of storage right around xmas time. We are the ones stuck paying a 180% premium on hard drives right now.
It is about time that someone points out that Apple is minimally affected by the HDD shortage. In fact, every computer that Apple sells can be purchased with SSD. This should turbocharge their Mac sales as other OEMs start running out of computers to sell.
Hard drives for PCs are like Floppy drives a few years ago. Apple is just ahead of the game like always. I really enjoy the speed of the SSD on my MacBook Air.