Digitimes reporting on falling NAND Flash storage

Cleve Nettles
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February 19, 2008
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Digitimes reports today on the state of falling NAND Flash prices.  Specifically, the price of a 16Gbit MLC segment is expected to fall below $5 and continue dropping through the rest of the quarter.

This news has an effect on Apple in a few ways.  First, the MacBook Air has a 64Gbyte NAND Flash hard drive option.  If Digitimes is to be believed, the 64Gbytes of NAND Flash should cost about $200.  Memory controllers and other parts of the drive cost more of course.  Keep in mind that SSD Memory uses a high quality NAND memory with more read/writes than standard Flash Memory so prices may not directly correlate.  If memory prices are falling across the board, Apple will likely be able to drop its (currently $1000) prices and/or order higher capacity drives (128GByte) in the coming months.

More importantly... this news also has a strong effect on the iPod business.  When the latest generation of iPod products were released in September, the price of 16Gbits of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash was around $15 or about 3 times the current prices.   Therefore, Apple could probably lower the prices on its NAND Flash based iPods (Shuffle, Nano, Touch) and iPhone to make up for this discrepancy.

Comments (4)

Anonymous Coward (not verified) | February 19, 2008 - 12:07am

Forget Touch, this could mean a price cut for iPhone!!

Anonymous Coward (not verified) | February 19, 2008 - 4:57am

Can you keep in mind that this price cut is for "every" flash based product out there please!

We can't all get our hands on iPhones (not because of the price... but because of the country) !!

Joe (not verified) | February 20, 2008 - 1:47pm

Wait, so we can't talk about iPhones until every country - or more specifically YOUR country - has them officially available?

I had no idea you were so important to this site, Anonymous Coward.

Anonymous Coward (not verified) | February 19, 2008 - 9:55am

Or, Apple could keep prices where they are, and keep investors happy with nice fat margins.