fool.com— Motley Fool story on Apple's aggressive sourcing of flash memory and the potential for a new instant-on or near instant-on machine.
Nov 22, 2005View in Crawl 4
not so sure about this one, although I wouldn't put it past Apple. I also wouldn't put it past either Apple or Intel to be secretly developing a very specific chipset for Apple as a way of really locking down the OS, but that is another discussion for another thread somewhere. Anyway, like another poster said, flash memory really isn't all that speedy. Unless they develop significant improvements in this area, I don't see flash memory replacing either the hard drive or as a separate OS partition. Nonetheless, I, like many others, am anxiously awaiting the coming year to see if Apple does anything innovative with the new mactels or if the first gens will simply be what we've got now except with intel organs instead of IBM organs.
This is a simple, yet genius idea. I don't think we are to the point where it would be reasonable to use Flash memory instead of a hard drive, but using it just for the OS for near instant start ups is brilliant.
linsys, that's BS, the windows OS has to basically restart. I have never seen a windows computer instantly come to the desktop the second you wake it from sleep.
The only reason they'd put flash drives into their machines would be for SERIOUSLY thin powerbooks, picture it now a powerbook thats as thin as the top half is now, People would wet themselves to get a hold of one. The Apple PowerRAZR :-)BUT you're gonna need a s**tload of NAND to do that. So it aint gonna happen untill we're getting 20gb NAND chips.At the moment, its for the iPOds. They obviously want to make as many iPOds as possible flash based. And as aleady pointed ou, who turns off their Mac these days anyway, my mac mini never gets turned off, and my ibook boots up in 35ish seconds, barely enough time for me to settle my ass into position and settle it comfortably on my lap.
carbitoNov 23, 2005
Isn't Microsoft already doing this in a partnership with Samsung?!?
blueice03Nov 23, 2005
not so sure about this one, although I wouldn't put it past Apple. I also wouldn't put it past either Apple or Intel to be secretly developing a very specific chipset for Apple as a way of really locking down the OS, but that is another discussion for another thread somewhere. Anyway, like another poster said, flash memory really isn't all that speedy. Unless they develop significant improvements in this area, I don't see flash memory replacing either the hard drive or as a separate OS partition. Nonetheless, I, like many others, am anxiously awaiting the coming year to see if Apple does anything innovative with the new mactels or if the first gens will simply be what we've got now except with intel organs instead of IBM organs.
timmyk_Nov 23, 2005
This is a simple, yet genius idea. I don't think we are to the point where it would be reasonable to use Flash memory instead of a hard drive, but using it just for the OS for near instant start ups is brilliant.
matrixsjdNov 23, 2005
linsys, that's BS, the windows OS has to basically restart. I have never seen a windows computer instantly come to the desktop the second you wake it from sleep.
maniacfiveNov 23, 2005
The only reason they'd put flash drives into their machines would be for SERIOUSLY thin powerbooks, picture it now a powerbook thats as thin as the top half is now, People would wet themselves to get a hold of one. The Apple PowerRAZR :-)BUT you're gonna need a s**tload of NAND to do that. So it aint gonna happen untill we're getting 20gb NAND chips.At the moment, its for the iPOds. They obviously want to make as many iPOds as possible flash based. And as aleady pointed ou, who turns off their Mac these days anyway, my mac mini never gets turned off, and my ibook boots up in 35ish seconds, barely enough time for me to settle my ass into position and settle it comfortably on my lap.