Filed under: Portables, Rumors
Future Macs could be flash-based
Bloomberg is contemplating the future of Apple laptops this morning. Specifically, flash-based laptops with no internal hard drives.It has been suggested that Apple would use NAND flash memory chips in their machines, which are still much pricier than slim hard drives. Of course, NAND chip manufacturers are all for it: "It would be positive for flash memory makers in that new demand can be created from diversified applications,'' said James Song, an analyst at Good Morning Shinhan Securities Co. in Seoul.
It sure would be nice, as laptops could become much thinner (consider that the iPod nano is 80% smaller than a 80GB iPod), lighter and have less moving parts. Plus, we can already boot OS X from a usb flash drive, so why not?
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bratling said 3:17PM on 3-08-2007
So why not? Are you kidding? The largest flash iPod is 8 GB. You can barely fit a Mac OS X bootable system in that; iLife alone will overflow it. Never mind user data, like email.
Until flash memory becomes far cheaper, it will remain more suitable for appliances (such as iPhone and iPod) than for general purpose computers.
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Neven said 3:18PM on 3-08-2007
I'm not sure how much the technology has advanced on this, but isn't flash memory problematic because of its limited write cycles? iPods write only so often, but a full-scale computer would need to do it much more often.
Again, I may be way off on this - how much longer would these last than your typical SD card which starts going bad after a few years of use in a digital camera? (a computer would write much more often than a camera).
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Mike Shaffer said 4:34PM on 3-08-2007
So why not? 1. Price. For the forseeable future, 80GB of hard drive space will be a bunch cheaper than 80GB of flash drive. Don't see much changing that anytime soon. A couple of solutions is that Apple comes up with a magical ROM that has OSX et al and only use ram for storage...still would be big bucks. Or they figure out a "less storage is actually okay" model, kind of like the iPod family model, but for a laptop. Or they come up with a special mobile version of OSX, ala Win Mobile. Which they already have with iPhone......hmmmmmmmmm.
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Dan Arel said 3:30PM on 3-08-2007
flash memory has no place in personal computers yet. more "affordable" drives are to small, and larger ones are more than anyone would spend on a laptop.
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blue Sam said 3:31PM on 3-08-2007
G5 ipod has largest as 80 GB. It's pretty light to me.
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Ed said 4:02PM on 3-08-2007
I'd buy one in a heartbeat as long as it was at least 60 GB
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Shamo said 3:52PM on 3-08-2007
There has been a lot of talk about NAND based MacBooks. While I don't think we will see them in the next few years because the cost of large capacity SSD, I think the more likely situation will be hybrid hard disk that have a flash and hard disk. This would still keep the costs down while gaining a performance in boot up, battery, and overall performance Apple is looking for.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/20/samsungs-hybrid-hard-disk-in-the-fo-realz/
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diulei said 3:56PM on 3-08-2007
I've always thought this would be the natural progression - Flash and/or solid state drives have so many advantages over the current spinning hard drives.
Granted, things right now are ridiculously expensive, but over the years prices will come down and storage will go up.
Remember how crappy, slow, and expensive CD burners were when they came out? Same idea, it will slowly trickle into common use.
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Daniel Lyons said 4:06PM on 3-08-2007
There's an 80% reduction in the size of an iPod because an iPod is a hard drive with a headphone hookup. A 2.5" hard drive is about the size of a deck of cards; there's plenty of other stuff inside a laptop which will ensure that making the hard drive even tinier isn't going to seriously reduce the size of the machine. I'd be surprised if there were any effect at all. I'm much more interested in what this will mean for speed and power consumption.
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Konstantino said 4:10PM on 3-08-2007
@ #4: The normal iPod (30/80 GB) is hard drive based, not flash based.
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Adrian said 5:03PM on 3-08-2007
@#8
It's a 1.8" drive.
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jonas said 6:21PM on 3-08-2007
no, it cant be thinner with just flash based harddrives. if you want the cd/dvd reader to have any kind of durability you need it to be somewhat thick.
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Leonard Nimrod said 5:48PM on 3-08-2007
Someone at Bllomberg read about LG's new laptop prototype with NAND/HDD hybrid drive and they dreamed of a full NAND drive. Whoopie!e
Obvoiusly, we will ventually we will see sub-compact notebooks that are all completely NAND, and then eventually normal notebooks that have all NAND options, but those are still years away.
Between Toshiba's hybrid NAND/HDD drives and Intel's push for integrated NAND on the main board (which I think Apple will use) there is no reason for full NAND to take over with the cost and size limitions still where they are.
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Chris said 5:58PM on 3-08-2007
A nano might be 20% the size of a 5thG, but it's also only 10% of the capacity. I don't see this happening until the GB/$ ratio for flash gets a LOT better.
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Reg Muffet said 6:22PM on 3-08-2007
Samsung have a 1.8" (which can be fitted into a 2.5" sleeve for an internal laptop bay) flash drive which is 32GB.
However, it costs $600 more than an equivalent mechanical hard drive. And that's at OEM prices.
But possibly Apple could use their buying power for a volume discount.
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Andrew Holden said 9:06PM on 3-08-2007
#12 - Nimrod, you are the one in the dark here. Samsung has already made a laptop with this tech in it - Bloomberg did not have to "dream" it up:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/10/samsung-shows-off-flash-laptop-drive-at-cebit/
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Galley said 9:54AM on 3-09-2007
I could see future iPods being flash-based. They would work like a portable Apple TV, meaning they have a cache for your unwatched TV shows, your latest CDs, etc. Everything else would be streamed over your local area network, or the Internet. If that's the case, then 16GB would suffice. There's no reason why the iPhone couldn't do the same thing.
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navstar said 12:18PM on 3-09-2007
Future Macs *could* be flash-based?! Wow, thanks for the insight Kreskin.
How about this one... Future Macs *could* have Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Future Macs could have higher resolution, brighter screens! Future Macs could have batteries that run longer!
Can I be called an analyst now??
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Marky said 3:57PM on 3-09-2007
The laptops couldn't get much thinner. Remember we are limited by the size of the connections upon it. The Ethernet socket and DVI connectors are quite high considering.
Marky
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