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Apple Rumored to Be After Samsung Flash Memory
Steve Nixon writes "An unconfirmed report today from Reuters quotes an industry analyst firm iSuppli as saying that Apple plans to buy as much as 40 percent of Samsung's second-half flash memory output.
The NAND flash memory cards will be used in a new, 4 GB iPod Mini, which Apple would release in time for the holiday shopping season, the report stated. The current version of the 4 GB mini contains a hard drive. Apple's iPod Shuffle uses flash memory."
Flash memory is going to do wonders for both battery life and size. Maybe I'll buy one of the new iPod minis if the rumors are true.
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Rumors for nerds. Stuff that may turn out to matter tomorrow.
Why is it all I see on Slashdot now-a-days is stories that were on engadget yesterday?
"It just feels snappier!"
to
"It just seems flashier!"
All your memory are belong to us. Well 40% of it anyways. After we pay you for it.
Sincerely,
Apple Computer
I hope this will help drive down the cost of flash memory so that flash-based hard drives will become available to the general public. Silent, less power-hungry, more reliable. How longer will we have to put up with very fragile magnetic disks spinning at 7000+ rpm under a head that would cut them in half if contact occurred...
Global warming is a cube.
what kind of price changes would we expect to see, if any? right now id love to get an iPod, but they are a take on the expensive side. Would be nice if it dropped just a little for the cheapo people like myself :)
Having a 4GB iPod for $50 less thana full iPod seemed like a bad idea, but it worked. I'm wondering if using flash, which should increase price, will shorten the gap between the Mini and the low-end iPod. Then again, maybe apple wants people to notice the GB/price ratio and get the full-fledged iPod instead.
I don't get it.
I don't think the big news here is that Apple is making a Shuffle-Mini hybrid, but that Fourty percent of the world's Samsung Flash memory stock is going to be eaten by a single buyer. Think about how many different manufacturers and resellers buy that memory - and 40% of it is going to Apple. Wow.
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Looks like Samsung is wooing Apple with a price reduction. Samsung also makes mp3 players. Seems like they would hoard the memory for themselves. Maybe they have figured out the sweet spot, in terms of profit, of how much to keep for themselves and how much to sell to the best selling brand.
An iPod mini with flash memory instead of a hard drive obviously would have much better battery life and be significantly lighter.
What's it worth to you, though? $300? Will we have to wait a while before the price point becomes attractive? For me, frankly, battery life has never been an issue.
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Hopefully this would push down the size of the iPod mini. I can't help but hide a smile when people talk about how small the minis are, when you can get 10 times the storage on something only about twice as big...
Until the iPod mini is really small (like shuffle size), it is just impractical for people with decent sized music collections. The size and weight you save vs the large models isn't enough to outweigh the loss in capacity. Of course, I guess it's ok for people who call 64kbps "near CD quality"...
I call FUD. I jog with my 20GB iPod every day, and I've never had a problem.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Just doing a quick search of retail prices, it looks like I could get a 4 GB compact flash card for about $250, while a 4 GB microdrive runs about $200. Anyone know what the price is like on the Samsung NAND flash memory? The article claims Samsung would have to drop prices 50% to match microdrives, but that seems like a little much - how much less power does NAND flash memory use than a microdrive, and how much less battery would a flash-based device need for comparable performance?
Nothing says Apple has to stick with using only one 4GB flash memory... (beyond price).
A smaller Mini that holds 8GB might go over well, and fit even better between the large iPods and the Shuffle.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple put a mouse on every one of their computers - now every computer has a mouse (or equivalent). Apple put a CD-ROM in every Mac - now every computer has one. Apple put ethernet in every Mac - now it's default standard. Apple put a "universal serial bus" in every Mac, for data and media, and now we all use them. If they replace HDs with FlashROM for all personal storage, we might just all get to leave the rotating discs behind, connected to the network. Go, Apple, go!
--
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Samsung: "Apple is always after me lucky flash memory; it's expensively shock-resistant!"
This has been brought up in photography circles for quite some time. A surprising number of people were adverse to flash based Compact Flash (CF) cards because of this.
BUT - you get unlimited reads, lots and lots of writes (about 10^6 with modern cards) and the write longevity can be improved by buffering algorithms. I wouldn't use flash for a swap file, but unless your taste in music changes every 30 seconds, flash memory should be just fine.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you update your iPod once per day (for new podcasts mostly and a couple additions to your song collection) and you get 100,000 writes with flash memory (IIRC), then that's about 270 years of use.
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...or even a DVD-iPod.
What I don't like about harddrives is that thowing them around isn't good at all. In addition, they rotate at 5200 RPMs at minimum which isn't good for the battery. And constantly stopping the drive reduces its life rapidly. Actually, shutting down (even correctly!) a harddisk is the most damaging thing that can happen to it.
Flash memory is slow to write, and it wears off in rewrite cycles. Actually, all Siemens S45i phones I've seen had their flash memory broken because the phone constantly rewrote the addressbook. If you buy a flashdrive, it will probably have a notice about it supporting no more than 1000-10000 rewrites.
I don't know if there's any progress happening, but I'm know that it was the situation 3 years ago .
CDs on the other hand can be easily thrown away if broken.
Also, they can have DRM that doesn't discriminate the user:
for example, for each song recorded there can be an included license for the specific playback device. The song can have the license included directly at iTunes Store and then burned to the CD without having to be saved anywhere at the harddisk. The user can be allowed to copy the CD because it won't play on any device except the one listed in the license.
I call FUD on you! People who post to ./ don't jog, their only heavy breathing occurs when a bugfix is released to the Linux kernel.
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This is getting to be an urban legend...
Yes, flash memory has a limited lifespan. So too does magnetic media. One can reasonably expect at least 10,000 write cycles on a particular NAND gate for consumer level flash memory - and that's the barest minimum. It's even more likely that you'll get a million cycles out of consumer NAND flash memory these days. And even that is conservative - it could be several million.
In normal operation, how long would it take before you would use up a million writes on a particular sector? And with arranging files intelligently on the memory, that's going to be less of a concern. Do you completely recreate your entire music library on your iPod every single time you add a song? Probably not. Would you do this a million times before buying a new iPod. I'm guessing no.
The number of cycles on current NAND flash technology is more than enough to last for years. Granted, I wouldn't want to use it for a swap partition, but for storing your music library you should be perfectly fine.
...which has the best MTBF Vs. Cost? Flash or HD?
Given the history of CF cards on my digital camera, I'm not going to rush out when this releases. Anyone got some good hard data on which rules for this sort of thing and not "well, Apple must have done their homework if they're doing it". I leave everything before Mac OSX as evidence that they ain't perfect.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Flash is far more expensive per unit of memory than disk drives. Engadget.com is estimating that Apple might get as much as a 50% price reduction from Samsung. However, even at such a sharply reduced cost, a 20GB flash iPod would likely cost ~$500 or more. The current market surely won't support such an expensive 20GB MP3 player.
While thinking philosophically, we see problems in places where there are none. -Wittgenstein
And here's a great big reason why Apple doesn't support Ogg Vorbis (besides the fact that it doesn't do anything for you that MP3 doesn't), it's widely used for distributing music on bittorrent based sites, that is to say that it is widely used in piracy, and Apple doesn't need to get assfucked by the RIAA over iPod sales for a bunch of geeks, especially after the Grokster decision.
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This is similar to the fact that when Apple introduced the iPod the 5Gb drive it used actualy cost more then the iPod retailed for causing many to buy iPods just for the drive. Of course Apple was probably less then 1/3 that price for them due to there sizable orders.
Ok, I have to wonder, why these never caught on. I have a mini-disc player and I love it.
I get 30 hours off of one AA, 15 off the rechargable.
I can throw my MP3's on it easily, (sonicstage sure, stupid program, but its easy)
I pay $5 for 1GB discs and it came with one.
Playlist management on the device.
Plus I can record through a mic to it, transfer back and forth and whatnot.
It has never skipped for me.
They are fairly small, smaller than an IPod.
USB, optical or stereo jack in.
Anyway, yea, I would love to be enlightened
It only seems like a bad idea if you think only in terms of raw storage space. In the end the choice between a Mini and the full sized iPod is also one of form factor, where the significantly smaller size adds a lot of value, especially if people are not going to be listening to more than 4GB of music anyway (every person has an amount of storage beyond which nothing is useful).
I don't think using Flash will increase price. What I thgink will happen in the new flash iPods will be smaller still, with longer battery life - at the same price as the old Mini. Alternatley (depending on how cheap it is to buy in that large a quantity) I could see all of the above being true plus perhaps expanding storage to 8GB (by using two) instead of 4GB - it could even cost the same as larger iPods though and it wouldn't matter, since again the forma factor is different enough to make it a factor. Even if they were the same price I might well choose the Mini over a larger iPod (especially if one is flash and one not or battery life is dramatically different).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
320kbps MP3s are a fucking waste of diskspace and time. You gain nothing with a bitrate that high, a 192VBR would be much better.
And in case nobody has bothered to tell you or you're too ignorant to do your own research, there is no DRM on files you rip yourself, so I have no idea what you're talking about at the end there.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"Steve Jobs is always after me Lucky Charms!"
They're making a name for themselves this week! Lots of rumours and speculation :)
over Apple. I sense backhanders in return for hype
Bad journalism or maybe just useless English composition skills: it is rumoured
that Apple want flash memory. Then they say they *WILL* be used in 4GB iPod
Mini's. How can you have an unconfirmed rumour and attach such certainty in it?
Neko
Will this improve their Performance/Watt rating?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm an Apple zealot, I'm typing this on a Mac Mini, and I'm going to be clicking submit with my one mouse button, but there is no way I'll be buying a flash-based iPod. My free upgrade phone is on order (a Sony Ericsson K750), it has a USB connector, plays mp3s and takes a Memory Stick Duo Pro card (currently maxing out at 2Gb, but 4Gb version promised soon).
By the time Apple gets to market, I'll have all it's functionality plus the ESSENTIAL feature of automatically stopping playing when my phone rings, just by adding a card to my phone - which also has the simple game play and video playback functionality that is missing from iPods (even if Sony forgot to add a usable fast forward/rewind or pause button).
I'd love have an Apple device in my pocket, because they get the user interface right in ways that Sony Ericsson can't be bothered to think about, but until they have a LOT more functionality, I can't justify buying one.
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is that if apple buys up 40% of their production, they're likely to seriously increase their production in the next year, and the market will likely be flooded in a couple years. it has been a long time coming, but flash ram is about to undergo a serious price drop. combined with continual improvements in scaling and capacity, perhaps this means we'll have 40GB flash drives by 2007. that ought to shake things up a bit...
$200 for a flash drive is nothing.
The current Hitiachi drive alone in the mini is $500.
One of my Japanese co-workers had this to say about Sony:
They are masters of selling you expensive things you don't need. Case in point: TVs, Walkmen, Discmen, speakers, DVD players, boomboxes, and Playstations.
I think, of DAPs and Apple, something similar can be said:
Apple is master of making things you didn't know you need, at prices you didn't think you were willing to pay.
You got a Creative JB2 in Christmas 2001 INSTEAD of an Apple iPod, 5gb (which is what I bought). Yours is 10gb, but is also the same size as a Mac mini. I later sold my 5gb iPod to a friend, and got a 10gb iPod, which I STILL have as well. I now have a 512mb iPod shuffle.
You bought an iRiver H320 instead of an iPod; I suppose, from your admission, that you use it to record, and you wonder, "Why would I ever buy an iPod?" because you assume it's a lateral move. Apple's positioning is that there are TWO products that you don't own yet, and that is the mini and the shuffle.
Well, lets put it another way; Your iRiver replaces your JB2 in both size and capacity; the mini replaces your iRiver in terms of 'carriability'. You can fit a mini in your breast pocket, your jeans pocket, your back pocket, etc. It's smaller than many cellphones, and is useful because it's size allows it to be lighter and easier to carry. It's not meant to record (which is why you use your iRiver), but only for strict playback.
In other terms, it is a portable laptop to your iRiver desktop.
The shuffle is even smaller, more rugged, and lighter; it is a PDA to your iPod mini laptop!
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In case you haven't been around in the last year, the current minidisc players play mp3s. No encoding to other formats. Also, these have the ability to record in raw PCM stereo, with a mic. And upload it USB to your computer to edit.
That's great. But the guy asked why MDs never took off like ipods. MDs just added the feature you speak of DUE TO the popularity of mp3 players.
If you love DRM, enjoy. Not me.
iTunes DRM has never adversely effected me.
And yes, you can also use the new minidisc models as external USB storage drives. 1GB disc are about $6 each.
See above. I am not giving a state of the union on md's, I am explaining why they didn't take off like ipods.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Why couldn't you have a two tier tertiary storage system. 6GB of power hungry storage, and 256MB of low power storage, the 32 MB of volatile RAM etc...
That way your iPod wouldn't have to fire up the harddrive half as often. If you need to access your music you can, but providing you don't want to change the playlist / album or are happy with the shuffle selection you'd only need to fire up the HDD every couple of days.
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