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Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History?
Lucas123 writes "With NAND flash fabricators ramping up production, per GB prices of solid state drives are expected to drop by more than half by this time next year to about 50 cents. Even so, consumers still look at three things when purchasing a computer: CPU power, memory size, and drive capacity, giving spinning disk the edge. SSD manufacturers like Samsung and SanDisk have tried but failed to change consumer attitudes toward choosing SSDs for their performance, durability and lower power use. But, with the release of the new MacBook Air (sans hard disk drive), Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push and may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives, even if they're still an order of magnitude cheaper."
It's now 20% in the USA.
more than 10 million laptops ships with SSDs annually
Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push
...may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives...
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
It's an ultra-portable. What do you expect? 16 wide open RAM slots with a door in the bottom for easy access?
The "paltry" 1.4Ghz CD2 *is* better than most of the other offerings at this size and weight, and is the very low voltage variant from Intel designed with battery life and heat management in mind.
Your complaints seem to stem from "it's not as upgradable as a full size laptop, or as powerful! It needs to have all the benefits of a laptop, but also be really tiny and have all the benefits of an ultra-portbale at the same time".
It's not a TARDIS. Compromises were made when it was designed, to make it small. The other SSD offerings from Apple (and RAM) are in more standard configurations (SATA connectors, standard slots, etc) because they have the room to do that.
The market share stats don't bear out your anecdotes. Mac growth is far exceeding PC growth.
And as for your rationalisation for your anecdote: The netbook's time is done, growth is slowing, whilst iPad's growth is from strength to strength. Forester Research is predicting the iPad will outsell netbooks within 2 years.
I hear Argentina is on the forefront of computer trends, and the best place to go if you want to see where the world is heading.
- These characters were randomly selected.
>>>How come IE doesn't have 90%+ share?
Well let's see. Windows sits on 90% of the world's computers, IE is Windows' default browser, and is currently at 50% usage. So it's used by 50/90 or 5/9th of Windows PC users. If a similar proportion of Mac users used the default Safari, that would be 5/9 times 20% == 11% for Safari but real-world usage is only 4%.
So I suspect Macs are NOT at 20% share. Not even close.
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