These three items come together in my head.
Saw this today:
Samsung Electronics said Tuesday that it will launch two mobile computers in early June that will do away with hard drives altogether, replacing them with 32 gigabytes of NAND flash memory. … Unfortunately for U.S. consumers, both will be sold in Korea only.
While previously I saw this go by:
Owners of Apple Computer’s new MacBook consumer notebooks will find that upgrading or replacing the computer’s hard disk is as simple as adding more memory.
Together those reminded me of this…
…prompted South Korea’s Samsung to offer Apple a deep discount and be willing to dedicate 40% of its flash-memory manufacturing capacity to seal the deal.
Even though I recall the details of that last item being very murky, I think it’s pretty clear we can expect the first US release of a hard driveless portable to be from Apple. August MacWorld?
Flash based secondary storage creates some interesting options in physicality, power, programing, database, and OS design; it will be interesting to see how that shakes out. Can anybody think of some new applications it enables?
I think you’re forgetting that Apple make a quite successful flash-based MP3 player called “iPod”.
Mathias – I’m not catching your point. – ben
Well, what I came to say relates to what I think Mathias was trying to get at. I don’t know much about this hardware stuff and what flash memory versus old mechanical hard drives might enable, but there is an application that I have wanted on my portable for some time, and perhaps a flash hard drive would allow for it. My imagined application is this: something that plays mp3 even while my computer is closed, or “asleep”. So, before I leave sor school, I cue up my favorite playlist, I close the lid and put my computer in my bag, take my last drink of coffee and leave for school. I could then snake my headphone cord into my bag and listen to my media without an extra peice of hardware, like an iPod.
Maybe a hybrid of conventional hard drive, and some flash memory would allow this. I dunno.