The Ashes

Last year in June, Apple released the iPhone 3G after they everything for themselves. They didn’t tell us anything about a new product, but in the end the rumors were right and we got ourselves a better iPhone. Although the same thing often doesn’t happen twice, everything is different with Apple, and rumors about a new iPhone surfaced long time ago. Apple denies that they will release a new product, but recently they unveiled the iPhone 3.0 OS, and now they placed an order for 100 million 8Gb chips.

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that Apple will release the next-gen iPhone at the WWDC ‘09 in June. Most of the 100 million 8Gb flash chips will come from Samsung, and they can be combined to design 16Gb and 32 Gb sizes which means that the upcoming iPhone will feature larger configurations. I remind you that last year, Apple placed an order of 50 million 8Gb chips, but this doesn’t mean that they will double their iPhone units – it means that they will double storage capacities.

As an offbeat topic, it seems like the NAND flash stocks are shortening because Nokia and Sony have placed similar orders. Well, as the NAND flash supply will remain tight until the end of May, we would expect NAND flash chip-manufacturers to increase their production, but this will not happen. Why? We don’t know that yet, but we will soon find out.

Meanwhile we are waiting for Apple to confirm the next-gen iPhone with 16Gb and 32Gb storage capacity.