Digitimes reports today on the state of falling NAND Flash prices. Specifically, the price of a 16Gbit MLC segment is expected to fall below $5 and continue dropping through the rest of the quarter. This news has an effect on Apple in a few ways. First, the MacBook Air has a 64Gbyte NAND Flash hard drive option. If Digitimes is to be believed, the 64Gbytes of NAND Flash should cost about $200. Memory controllers and other parts of the drive cost more of course. Keep in mind that SSD Memory uses a high quality NAND memory with more read/writes than standard Flash Memory so prices may not directly correlate. If memory prices are falling across the board, Apple will likely be able to drop its (currently $1000) prices and/or order higher capacity drives (128GByte) in the coming months. More importantly… this news also has a strong effect on the iPod business. When the latest generation of iPod products were released in September, the price of 16Gbits of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash was around $15 or about 3 times the current prices. Therefore, Apple could probably lower the prices on its NAND Flash based iPods (Shuffle, Nano, Touch) and iPhone to make up for this discrepancy.
