oskar said:How can so many think this means we'll see hard drives replaced by flash memory? Solid state memory is still too expensive.
Ha, ha, ha, ha!!! That is such a good laugh!!!
Why, young-un, I remember way back in 1984 people saying the exact same thing as you are now - only then they were talking about bubble memories, same idea. Back then a big hard drive was 10MB. YES! 10,485,000 bytes! That is smaller than the smallest flash memory drives are now and it cost $600 in 1983 dollars! Make that $4,000 in 2005 dollars. For that $4,000 you can now buy 55GB of Flash memory. Dollar for dollar Flash memory is incredibly cheap compared to where hard drives were.
Of course, hard drives have also dropped in price and for that $4,000 you can now buy 40TB of hard drive. So yes, hard drives are cheaper, but they consume more power, are larger, noisier and are more fragile. For certain application the slightly higher cost is well worth the price and not all devices need huge amounts of storage.
A tiny iBook or pocket handheld iPal with a mere 16GB or storage space would be plenty for highly mobile work. Within a year the price of that would be under $400 at the current rate of decline in Flash memory prices. That is enough to store:
2GB - MacOS X operating system
2GB - Applications (most frequently used on an uber-book)
4GB - Home folder - generous and not including music, videos, photos
2GB - Recent photos (archive past years on external drive)
2GB - Music (most played songs and audio books)
2GB - Video or two for the road
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2G free space remaining
You don't have to store everything on the ultra-portable, just your most used data. At home or maybe on the web you would have additional storage for archived photos, additional music, movies, backups, etc.
This means that a Flash memory based ultra-portable notebook or handheld computer could be a reality at a decent price point using today's technology. It would be fast, small, lower power, longer battery life and real world rugged. There are a lot of people who would buy a machine like that. Think of something about the size of a small paperback book that has a run time of 40 hours or longer on four high capacity AA NiMH batteries. Very portable. Your home away from Home. Auto-syncing of course.