Apple to move all iPods to flash memory?

Prudential Equity Group analyst Jesse Tortora reckons that Apple is planning to ditch hard drives in favour of flash memory in its iPods.

He claims that the company intends to offer an all-flash iPod range by the end of the year.

Am I missing something? Flash memory might be about to top 16GB or maybe even 32GB this year and while this is great for the iPod nano and the iPhone, why would Apple ditch 80GB or more hard drives in favour of that?

And surely putting two flash drives into an iPod to give it the capacity a hard drives offers isn't going to give Apple any of the benefits that flash might hold over hard drives...

And the other thing is that I was speaking to someone from Hitachi recently who said that hard drives are going to continue to increase in capacity to such an extent that flash really isn't going to ever catch up...

Generally, given Apple's understandable refusal to talk about future products it can be interesting to read what the analysts say - after all they are supposed to be pretty clued up on the industry (they are paid enough to be anyway) but sometimes you wonder where they get their ideas from...

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Comments received

AlanAudio said on Wednesday, 14 February 2007

There have been a significant minority of users who have complained of HD failures in iPods.

Perhaps Apple know that the HD is the weakest link and although fine in most cases, isn't sufficiently durable for absolute reliability.

Flash would be nearly indestructable and would use less power, so it offers opportunities for exciting new designs.

Top-of-the-range iPods are not particularly price-sensitive. I think that the extra cost of providing an immense amount of flash memory wouldn't kill the product's appeal, so a 64GB iPod might be feasible this year by using two or four chips.

karenhaslam said on Thursday, 15 February 2007

Good point! It will be interesting to see what Apple does. Thing is, even if it makes sense I don't see them moving quickly in that direction...