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The state of solid-state
One of the biggest features on the new MacBook Air is the optional solid-state hard drive.
For an extra $999, users can choose to equip their new laptops with the new SSD drives. Unlike conventional hard disk drives, which store data on magnetic plates, solid-state drives store data on flash memory chips.
Is the the SSD going to be the next big thing, or are buyers throwing away money on a premature technology?
There are plenty of benefits to SSDs, mainly the reliability that comes from the absence of moving parts and the increased speed. However, there's also a huge cost that comes with it. Apple's thousand-dollar price tag is actually considered on the reasonable side.
Other vendors are offering the drives, but only on high-end business models. HP doesn't plan on SSD's even being feasible for consumer PCs until 2010, when flash memory prices drop low enough to make the drives comparable in cost to HDDs.
On the other hand, Apple does have a reputation for being ahead of the curve. The iPod seemed to be too expensive and high-end when it debuted, but by the time the portable media player market developed, iPod had become the de-facto standard.
Perhaps three or four years from now we'll see other vendor's introducing slim solid-state notebooks and desperately trying to compare themselves to the MacBook Air.
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