Peter, thanks for the price information.
Here is the trend to watch, from which MU will be greatly benefited by its Lexar and joint venture with Intel:
A PRUDENTIAL research note yesterday indicated that Apple's next generation Video iPod may be based on NAND flash technology instead of the 1.8” hard disk drives (HDDs) made by Toshiba, which are currently being used as the Video iPod's storage medium. They expect this version of the Video iPod to be released in late 2007.
More importantly - AAPL will not be the only one that will transfer from HDD to NAND. In fact, every MP3/Video gear maker, other than Apple - Creative, Sony, Archos, HP, DELL, ... will be more motivated for the transition since Apple has been the only one that gets its 1.8" HDD supply guaranteed.
The current NAND price is approaching a turning point rapidly. At the current price about $4.8-5 for a 8 gb NAND chip, the cost for a 30 GB flash disk is about $130-150, the transition from HDD to NAND used in MP3/video players will be massive.
Another transition that is going to happen, or has already been happening, is NAND replacing DV tape. I am using a Canon S3 (6 m pixels with image stablizer, and 12x optical zoom), in addition to a Canon XT for photos only, for both digital photography and video (full zooming and unlimited length) - replacing my Sony TRV900 I bought late 1999. The Sony TRV 900 uses a 3CCD sensor and was, and still is, the top line among the prosumer DV camcorders. However, the video quality generated by the Canon S3 is superior to the DV tapes generated by the Sony TRV 900. In addition, the Canon S3 digital camera is much lighter and smaller than the Sony TRV900, and it takes high-quality static digital photos as well. The only problem is that it consumes large memory space - 2 M bytes per second. That means a 4 GByte SD card can only record about 2000 seconds, or 33 minutes, video.
With the NAND price reduction, it becomes much practical to use the digital camera as a camcorder. We will see the massive conversion from DV camcorder to high-quality digital camera/camcorder that uses NANS fresh memory in the next few months/years.
Still more, the NAND in cellphone for high quality photos/video/mp3 and GPS will also generate huge revenue for NAND manufacturers. |
