Flash-Based Video iPod In The Pipeline?

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on June 08, 2007

Taiwan’s Digitimes has an interesting note today about a surge in demand for NAND-flash memory modules going into the third calendar quarter of this year, which some of these chipmakers are attributing to plans for a video-ready iPod that would use flash memory instead of a hard drive.

My expectation is that once the iPhone is out of the gate and on the market, that the entire iPod lineup is going to go through a substantial redesign and refresh cycle. The mainstream iPod will look a lot more like the iPhone, and could conceivably have the iPhones touch screen, which has been the subject of two previous BusinessWeek stories, here and here. Think of it as an iPhone without the phone.

But one source in the Digitimes story suggests that prices on NAND flash are moving in such a way that were Apple to pull the trigger now, the final product wouldn’t be price competitive with the hard-drive based models.

The trend toward flash-based media players is clearly growing. Market research firm iSuppli, in a research report issued June 4, reckons that the number of video-capable flash-based media players shipped will grow 25 times by 2011 to 150 million. Players with hard drives, however will grow at a much slower rate, hitting only 35 million units by that date.

The advantages using flash include longer battery life, and a lesser risk of mechanical failure, since there are no moving parts as with a hard drive. The problem with flash, at least for the moment, is that compared to a hard drive, it costs more to get to the higher storage densities that you’d need for video.

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