flash based macbook / pro?

[andiwm2003]

on a german magazine online site they have an article referring to Shaw Wu of American Technology Research. he says that there will be flash based notebooks from apple this year. is that news or old news? or is it unlikely that flash gets cheap enough to do that?

just wanted to throw it out. sorry if it's old news.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,470630,00.html

 

[mattscott306]

The rumor mill had churned this one out before, but nothing has been confirmed.

 

[dvader]

Well, I didn't know it would come out this year. I just read that article, but I still doubt flash-based drives will come out this year. I'm not referring to the Robson tech on the new Santa Rosa chips, I'm talking about flash drives totally replacing HDDs. That might take at least 2 to 3 more years, no? I'm just guessing.

Some say that it will never replace HDDs.

 

[Helianthus]

I can't see this happening in the near future. Flash memory is still fairly expensive, especially considering how much you would need to replace a hdd.

 

[andiwm2003]

i'm also pessimistic for this year. currently notebooks have 80GB or larger HDDs. and most people seem to use 60GB or more. so apple would have to release minimum 60GB flash based notebooks, more realistically 80-100GB. that sounds expensive. maybe a sub-notebook.

 

[Problem Child]

Using flash memory would improve battery time, but I dont think they can compete with the say 200gb hard drives in some macs.

 

[twv]

tablet-mac

it's going to be a flash-tablet-mac with multi-touch-on-screen-keyboard on some other nice and unexpected futures and gimmicks. believe me, you'll remember my words...

 

[mkrishnan]

I can't see this happening in the near future. Flash memory is still fairly expensive, especially considering how much you would need to replace a hdd.

It's going to happen sooner or later, though. Almost certainly. The "this year" part is another matter. Some people here have been positing that what will emerge will somehow be a "macro" version of the iPhone -- an all solid state ultraportable that will not only be extremely thin and light but may also be differentiated in terms of intended use and so on in software... but who knows?

 

[JosephOfNazaret]

Flash RAM And Hard Drive Combo???

Not sure if this is technically possible or not, but I think it makes sense for Apple (or anyone) to build a laptop with faster flash ram containing essential system files at the very least. This would allow for much faster boot up times, and offer a compromise between performance and cost.

 

[mkrishnan]

Not sure if this is technically possible or not, but I think it makes sense for Apple (or anyone) to build a laptop with faster flash ram containing essential system files at the very least. This would allow for much faster boot up times, and offer a compromise between performance and cost.

It is technically possible... it exists in at least two forms:

1) Robson caching

2) Flash-assisted hard drives

 

[nateDEEZY]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070308/tc_nm/apple_memory_dc;_ylt=AsyaJhDcQQnNvbcWAWwEzHIxVrIF

Theres an article on yahoo about it.. Kinda interesting... heh.

 

[mkrishnan]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070308/tc_nm/apple_memory_dc;_ylt=AsyaJhDcQQnNvbcWAWwEzHIxVrIF

Theres an article on yahoo about it.. Kinda interesting... heh.

Ahhh, I see he's also claiming Apple will use whatever the miniaturized OS X is.

 

[JDN]

If there is talk of flash in notebooks/subnotebooks then surely we should be seeing a transition to flash for the larger iPods??

 

[XP Defector]

Flash memory is not as fast as say a 7200RPM HD though? I'm thinking purely for the audio engineers out there.