08.24.05

Apple Hand In Nand With Samsung

By David Utter

A forthcoming NAND flash memory iPod from Apple will have Cupertino buying lots of Samsung chips.

Hard disk iPods? That's so last month. Apple, already a Samsung customer buying flash memory for the iPod Shuffle media players, could buy more than a third of Samsung's NAND technology flash memory chips.

A Reuters report notes two analyst firms expect this purchase as a precursor to a holiday rollout of a 4GB iPod that stores songs in flash memory instead of on a hard disk. To that end, Apple will have to secure as much as 40 percent of the NAND chips Samsung will produce.

Samsung wants Apple's business enough to make some serious price concessions on those NAND chips. Those concessions will drop the profit margins, but Samsung's margins on NAND are "abnormally high" according to an iSuppli Corp analyst quoted in the article.


It is possible Apple could ship as many as 15 million iPods during the holiday season. If analyst figures are correct, as many as four million of those would be flash memory iPods, based on Samsung's NAND production capability.