Apple to Manufacture Single 100 Million Gigabyte iPhone?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on April 9, 2009 at 11:52 AM PT
To the NAND flash memory business, Apple is a market maker and mover–and an increasingly insatiable one. The company first shook the NAND industry back in 2005 when it arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND output for use in it iPods. In 2008 it did so again, reportedly buying up 50 million 8GB-equivalent NAND flash chips from Samsung, an amount so large the company was forced to reduce its supply to other customers to fulfill its obligation to Apple (AAPL).
Now comes word that the company’s appetite has been renewed–and doubled. Industry sources tell DigiTimes that Apple has placed an order for 100 million 8Gb (1 gigabyte) chips from Samsung, an order so large it is reportedly causing a supply shortage. If correct, the DigiTimes report could lend a bit of credence to rumors of a low-end iPhone. Unless, of course, Apple plans to use them for something else entirely, (a single, massive 100 million gigabyte iPhone?)–also a distinct possibility.
Either way, contract prices for flash memory are likely to rise to unpleasant levels in the near future.
Comments
I could do without the childish title to this article.
Posted by Joseph McCrate at April 9th, 2009 at 12:21 pmOf course, they have to wait for Snow Leopard for the iPhone to handle that much RAM at once.
Maybe some of it is for the new tablet Mac coming in the Fall? Yeah, the one people have predicted is coming for, what, five years?
Posted by Eric Welch at April 9th, 2009 at 12:33 pmThere is a typo in the article – it is 100 million 8 Gb, not 8 GB chips.
There is also no direct relation to iPhones nor device capacity, as any random number of these chips can be combined in one device. So, they could be used for iPhones and iPods having any capacity. They could be used for Macs (faster start-up or saving the system status during sleep or between sessions), they could even be used for USB sticks containing software installations to replace CD/DVD media, or to create special dongles to prevent Snow Leopard from being installed on non-Apple computers, a completely new device… or all of that. The order does not tell anything.
Posted by Uwe Rueckeshaeuser at April 9th, 2009 at 2:21 pm