Claims that the concepts of 1" and 1.8" harddrives may be in their final days are taken out of proportion, market research firm iSuppli said. Several media reports hinting in this direction were triggered by an iSuppli analyst who said that Samsung may have slashed prices for 2 GByte and 4 GByte Flash memory chips by as much as 50 percent in order to convince Apple to dump the harddrive in the successor of the iPod mini.

However, iSuppli stated that that it did not report that Apple would discontinue sales of harddrive-based iPods. While the price reduction initiated by Samsung is likely to increase pricing pressure on other Flash manufacturers as well as harddrive companies, the capacity of 1" and 1.8" drives is expected to grow to keep a distance to Flash chips: "Harddrive suplliers are note xpected to sit still in the face of rising competitive challenges from NAND Flash and will respond by offering higher-density drives at lower costs," iSuppli analyst Krishna Chander writes in his most recent article. (THG)