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A Flash Based 4GB iPod mini?
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d.perel said:
Just imagine if flash drops even more significantly and it becomes realistic to offer a 512 meg iPod Shuffle for $29.99. Its almost at that point now, but I mean for it to drop enough to where Apple can maintain its traditional margins. It also pits the Shuffle at nearly the same price point as the Napster cards at the Shell and Exxon gas station mini marts.
Now if only a Mac Mini could clock in at $299. That means the Wal-Mart folk "switching" en masse.
Apple has already reduced the 1GB Shuffle from $149 to $129.Lynxpro said:
I would expect a reasonable discount for the 512MB Shuffle would be in the $69, $79 or $89 range.
I doubt that we would see one in the less than $60 range given the price of manufacturing and Apple wanting to make a profit.
Sushi
One more mockup ... a totally different form factor - just a small 'pill-shaped' player with a small built in color display in the side/top. Similar material to iMac with white plastic inside and clear lucite case.
Flash Mini Formfactor
Some nice drawings showing up in this forum. The Flash Mini is not a Shuffle.
It's like a little brother to the iPod. Stainless steel back, polished white front. About 9mm thick. About 40x80mm overall. Someone who has actually held one said it is pure elegance. He speaks of certain castration by Apple if any sketches or photos leak.
I think Apple is betting the farm on this Flash Mini. Street says 10M units are scheduled to deliver for Christmas.
One closely held secret is whether or not it has a photo-quality display. If so, this tells me the existing Mini formfactor may be on the way out.
I hear the price has to be north of $199, which might also support the theory that Mini is end-of-life. Absolutely no guidance available on this point.
Sorry, no quotable sources. you expect this kind of thing from newbies!
(am in Southern China)
Some nice drawings showing up in this forum. The Flash Mini is not a Shuffle.
It's like a little brother to the iPod. Stainless steel back, polished white front. About 9mm thick. About 40x80mm overall. Someone who has actually held one said it is pure elegance. He speaks of certain castration by Apple if any sketches or photos leak.
I think Apple is betting the farm on this Flash Mini. Street says 10M units are scheduled to deliver for Christmas.
One closely held secret is whether or not it has a photo-quality display. If so, this tells me the existing Mini formfactor may be on the way out.
I hear the price has to be north of $199, which might also support the theory that Mini is end-of-life. Absolutely no guidance available on this point.
Sorry, no quotable sources. you expect this kind of thing from newbies!
(am in Southern China)
podfuture said:
While I really don't believe you at all (I mean, anonymous sources from a newbie account with the name podfuture) just wanted to say that if Apple replaced the current mini form factor with something that looks like the full sized ipod (stainless steel back, white plastic front) it'll be a huge step backwards.
Ya, the iPods are nice looking and all, but the one piece aluminum casing of the mini is an excellent, amazing, perfect piece of equipment, much superior to the full sized iPod, IMO.
The sizes you mention are about what I'd like to see, but I think they should stick with the once piece multi colored aluminum construction of the current mini.
No, you're not getting it. Just for the sake of your information, SAMSUNG is one of the companies I track as a financial analyst. A rapid estimate shows that most likely they'll have to invest heavily in production simply to meet the extra demand, in order to fulfil contractual obligations that appear to be substantially under the market rate for "ordinary" (non-preferential) mid-sized bulk purchases. If SAMSUNG is doing this for any rational reason, they're doing it in an attempt to wean Apple away from hard-disk technology (as is incidentally noted in the original article). Once Apple is weaned away from hard-disk technology and is entirely reliant upon solid-state memory, they can always go and purchase their NAND-flash chips from whomever offers them the lowest price, and thus SAMSUNG won't necessarily retain the customer.mrgreen4242 said:I'm sorry, but you really aren't getting it. [...] But, go ahead and sell your shares, hopefully one of my 401k funds will buy them up for you.
Suit yourself.
I'm a financial analyst. You don't fully understand the dynamics of SAMSUNG's business. Read my previous post: SAMSUNG doesn't have the production capacity to meet the increased demand and have no guarantees that they will retain the customer (Apple) in the medium- to long-term. Thus they have incurred sales costs (which I'm sure they'll account for in Goodwill terms) and investment obligations with no certainty of ROI.
Anyway the market has voted already: shares were down on after-close trading on 22 Aug and throughout 23 Aug. Chart
Anyway the market has voted already: shares were down on after-close trading on 22 Aug and throughout 23 Aug. Chart
I don't like that even if it's only 9mm thick.
I hardly can image how they will fit 4GB in that
small package.
I found this on a popular geman site:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59792
This shows a 8GB (16GB) solid state disk from samsung
and it is fitted in a 1.8" form factor case.
One chip holds 512 or 1024 MB so apple have to fit
4 chips together with the logic board in a really
small case. But maybe apple knows how like the always do.
End-of-life? I hope you're wrong. What about 6GB and
8GB iPod mini? What about all the accessories available
for ipod mini? There are still demands for these.
Just my words.
JD
qubex said:
I think the reason for the ribbing you've endured on this thread comes from your earlier equation of samsung giving apple a good deal to samsung committing fraud. This really undermines your statement that you're a financial analyst. Companies routinely sell at or below current costs, for a variety of reasons, from economies of scale to market share to reduction of inventory, among other things. I'm not familiar with Samsung's reasons, but one could easily make the case that with a large order from Apple, they could corner the market in high-end flash memory. Even if a company does make a poor decision regarding a sale, this alone doesn't constitute fraud. Suggesting otherwise makes it sound like you really don't know what you're talking about.
As for your implication that Samsung's recent short term stock price changes reflects investor attitude over an unsubstantiated rumor with limited distribution, I think this is just more evidence of your limited understanding of how the stock market works. You're really a financial analyst? For who?
Dave
qubex said:
I'm not a "financial analyst" but a sub-1% drop over a single day doesn't seem statistically significant to me. Also, the original article states that Apple has purchased about 40% of Samsungs production capability ("Apple Computer Inc. plans to buy as much as 40 percent of the NAND flash output of Samsung Electronics Co. in the second half of this year"), so I don't see why you believe they don't have the production facilities to supply this order.
Have you seen the contract that Samsung has with Apple? Do you have ANY IDEA WHAT SO EVER what the terms are? How can you be so certain that they won't be retaining Apple as a customer?
Does Reuters have a Korean site? I checked www.reuters.co.kr and it looks like a dating service to me (based on the pics, I don't read Korean and Googles Korean to English service didn't work for that page).
d.perel said:Imagine all new macs coming with 2 gb of ram standard
Of Flash memory?!?
tny said:
As I understand it, for flash it is only WRITE cycles which count as wear. You'll get a million of so writes, so unless you write a lot of data to your iPod then you'll be fine. The no latency, no seeking, no moving parts, less heat, etc are all very great benefits of flash memory.
One thing to note, flash is slower writing then reading. Often benchmarks show them writing at ~10MB/sec tops, but reading at 30MB/sec. I'm not sure how fast the ipod disk is, but it may take longer to fill it (assuming nice sequential writes for the ipod hard disk).
Maybe that's why it takes longer to load songs onto a Shuffle than the other iPods?
If so, that would be one drawback of a flash iPod Mini. Not a biggie though-
If so, that would be one drawback of a flash iPod Mini. Not a biggie though-