Digital Home Thoughts: Samsung Might Cut Prices on 4GB Memory for Flash iPod Mini

"According to Nam Kim, director and principal analyst for iSuppli's Memory ICs/Storage Systems research department, Samsung may be wooing Apple to convert parts of the iPod product line from using harddrives to Flash memory products. Apple already has booked as much as 40 percent of Samsung's NAND Flash output to support the production of 512 MByte and 1 GByte iPod Shuffle devices. To extend this relationship, Kim said that he believes that "Samsung has committed to Apple that its NAND products will match harddrive pricing."

I'm sure this news will make the Samsung digital music player division really happy. This just shows how far behind Samsung is with their mp3 players. If they hadn't fumbled the ball in the past, they'd be able to take advantage of the 4GB flash memory on their own players, but since they have almost no sales compared to Apple, they have to hook their cart up to the iPod and ride. In the mean time, their own players will get ignored because the iPod will have already beaten pretty much everyone to the market and at a price that only Apple can negotiate.

Again the iPod leads the way into new markets while the others can only watch and wait for Apple to screw up (and even then it will probably take a couple of them to matter). That wait keeps getting longer and longer and Apple keeps making more and more money. Even if/when a competitor figures out how to make a player that can compete with the iPod, Apple only has to price them out of the market using their buying power.