Upcoming MacBook Air SSDs to be made by STEC (not Samsung)

Quincy Pince-Nez
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April 28, 2008
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According to Barron's and B. Riley analyst Salomon Kamalodine, STEC will be making the Solid State Drives (SSD) in future Apple products - most notebly, the MacBook Air.  The 64Gb SSD's on current MacBooks are manufactured by Samsung.  High end MacBook Air owners were upset recently when their SSD Hard drives showed little performance increase and battery life over 1.8" hard drive equipped macbooks.  

Hopefully STEC can up the performance and lower the cost of entry to this technology.  They currently offer SSDs in capacities ranging from 73-512GB however the most likely candidate for the MacBook Air - the Mach8 line -  'only' scales to 128Gb.  Will this be the next MacBook Air go to 128Gb in SSD size?  Will the prices remain the same?  Are we going to see a revision 2 MacBook soon?

More from Barrons:

Kamalodine writes in a research note that the finding is based on “discussions with industry sources.”
He says the Apple business could lead to an incremental $25 million to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Kamalodine raised his 2008 and 2009 revenue estimates to levels well ahead of the Street consensus. He sees $237.8 million this year and $302.9 million next year; the Street has been looking for $217.6 million and $273.1 million.
STEC today is up 79 cents, or 9.7%, to $8.96.

Comments (1)

MarcG (not verified) | April 28, 2008 - 11:36am

Could this potentially bring SATA interface to the MBA?
This would be the only potential way of improving the performance advantage of SSD, which currently suffers sequentially due to the PATA interfaces of the MBA.