American Technology Research revealed that Apple Inc may launch a new
laptop that will save data on Flash
Memory chips replacing traditional
hard drives .
Shaw Wu, a San Francisco-based analyst at
American Technology Research, said in a report, "Our sources indicate that Apple would like to introduce the product in the second half to further capitalize on its strong MacBook growth."
According to Mr Wu the release date of Apple's new lighter and smaller
notebook PCs have not been decided. As it would depend upon the prices of NAND flash memory chips that are seven to eight times more expensive than traditional hard drive disks.
However, Alan Hely, spokesman for Apple in
London said that these are all rumours and he declined Shaw Wu’s report.
Samsung Electronics and many other NAND flash-memory making companies claim that flash memories have replaced hard drives as the storage device in portable
music players,
cameras,
mobile phones and other electronic devices. Moreover the $12 billion chipmaker market now aims at the future laptop.
James Song an analyst at Good Morning Shinhan Securities Co in Seoul said, "It would be positive for flash memory makers in that new demand can be created from diversified applications."
Semiconductor devices are much smaller than traditional hard drive disks, use less power and are much faster in terms of processing speed.
Samsung said that last year they launched world's first laptop that saves files on flash. They further said that the market for chip-based storage in
computers would rise to $4.5 billion by the end of the decade, from $538 million in 2006.
Dramexchange.com, Asia's biggest market for chips, showed that the price of the 4-gigabit NAND chip has fallen by 38 per cent this year from 76 per cent in 2005.
It is predicted that the next generation
laptops and
notebooks will have flash memories installed in them.