14 DAY TRIAL // We hear of price rises or falls every month, sometimes more than once, so one might be tempted to ignore them after a while, but that's liable to make them miss certain facts or possibilities.
Like, in this case, that solid-state drives, flash drives and memory cards may become visibly cheaper during the holidays.
According to so-called industry sources, the contract prices for NAND flash memory chips will decline this quarter (Q4 2013).
That's because global demand has been steadily weakening, and the controlled reduction in supply hasn't offset the imbalance yet.
Even though chip makers have been shifting focus to DRAM products, demand continues to be weaker than supply.
This might enable an unadvertised reduction in the retail prices of, as we said above, flash drive units, solid-state drives, and memory cards (CompactFlash, SDHC / microSDHC, SDXC/ microSDXC).
The difference between now and, say, a month from now won't be so massive, but when you factor in that prices have been steadily declining for months, it leads to some really nice bargains in some places.
So, with 2011 and last year having seen something similar happen to DRAM, 2013 may very well see a slew of NAND-based product sales in the winter holiday season.
Meanwhile, chip makers like Samsung will continue to allocate more of their available supply capacities to the manufacture of DRAM, whose spot prices have been on the rise for the past two quarters.
Such suppliers wouldn't need to rely on SSDs and flash drives, and other removable media, if smartphone sales weren't disappointing. As it is, they need to make the best of it.
Fortunately for us consumers, the supply-demand woes translate into more affordable products. And with USB 3.0 now common, there should be plenty of incentive to get a flash storage device this month or the next, in time for Christmas.