Apple to Give NAND Flash Market a Huge Blow with iCloud

Even though Apple is a key player in expanding the market for NAND flash, the Mac maker’s new iCloud service could cause demand for the memory to drop considerably, IHS iSuppli reports.

The analytics firm foresees that free storage of songs and other types of media on iCloud will decrease the need for local storage, whether it’s a personal computer, smartphone or tablet, that the customer is accessing said content on.

According to the IHS iSuppli Memory and Storage Service, “If storage consumption decreased by 100 gigabytes per user—calculated at a rate of 4 megabytes per song at Apple’s stated cap of 25,000 songs of free storage—the combined effect from Apple’s huge database of users could make a serious dent on NAND flash demand throughout the industry.”

“Apple has contributed greatly to the growth of the NAND business in recent years,” said Dee Nguyen, memory analyst at IHS.

“However, the company’s adoption of cloud storage could have significant implications because the fastest-growing segment of the NAND flash market lies in the storage component of convergent mobile devices like smartphones and tablets,” added Nguyen.

“And with Apple products like the iPhone and iPad accounting for a disproportionate share of NAND flash demand, any move among Apple users to offload storage to the company’s iCloud service could mean a corresponding decrease in demand for physical NAND flash memory in the future,” Nguyen concluded.

iCloud promises not only to eliminate the need to store your photos, music and videos locally, but also to make them accessible anywhere you are, as long as there’s an Internet connection.

Explained in the simplest form possible, “iCloud stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices,” as Apple itself puts it.

Moreover, iClous doesn’t just sync your music and photo library, but all your books, apps, documents, even email, contacts and calendars.

Since local storage requires manual updating, iCloud will indeed make NAND flash less relevant. The only question is ‘by how much?’