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Comment by mkempe | Hacker News Reader

What is the anticipated price/TB curve of SSD over the next five years? at what point would most consumer storage switch from HDD to SSD?

If we start with a HDD/SSD price ratio of 1:7 (based on a quick check with Amazon) and hope for SSDs to get cheaper/TB by 50% each coming 18 months (?) we'd have a strong incentive to switch by year 2019.

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I think we're pretty close to the mainstream switching now.

Inexpensive, large external HDDs will fill the gap on media storage for consumers long after the main drive has been switched to SSD for speed.

Consumers aren't going to wait for SSD to catch up to 5tb HDD externals that you'll be able to get for $129. They'll simply buy a system with 512gb to 1tb of SSD storage, and pick up the external if they need it.

That already happened. The biggest computer manufacturer (Apple) doesn't sell a machine without an SSD.

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac

I think you are being a little premature. All iMacs have hard drives by default.

They are hybrid drives, though. The only pure HDD option seems to be the 3 TB drive.

No, the default in every iMac is a 1TB Hard Drive.

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&ste...

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&ste...

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&ste...

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&ste...

Weird, the product page seems to present the hybrid drive as the default option.

Definitely feeling the pain of the standard HDDs put in our 2013 27inch iMacs

Interesting and eye-opening statement, but not entirely correct: The entry level iMac and Mac Mini SKUs have regular hard drives.

Apple is not the biggest manufacturer, it's the most profitable but it is not the biggest one by far.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/09/apples-domestic-ma...

Are Apple only the biggest if we include iPhones and/or iPads? I don't think anybody puts an HDD into a smartphone/tablet (it's surely all flash?) so it seems we'd have to limit the definition of computer to laptop/desktop to get anything interesting. Otherwise machines with an HDD are a minority already like you said.

Apple is the largest laptop/desktop manufacturer.

Do you have a source at all for that? I've found multiple articles saying Lenovo overtook HP for that title around July 2013 but nothing naming Apple. According to [0] Apple weren't in the top six at that point.

I did find articles from early 2012 calling Apple the biggest but that was of course based on iPads almost entirely. For example [1] has some figures from then, 5.2 million macs to over 10 million units each from HP, Lenovo and Dell.

[0] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23637017/hewlett-packard-loses...

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/24/apple_now_largest_...

No, they're not. They're the most profitable, not the same as the biggest.

HP/Lenovo have the top two spots, they're selling tens of millions per quarter. Apple barely breaks 5 million.

Apple doesn't have great business nor governmental support, which eliminates them from being considered at thousands of companies.

You're right. I was thinking of profit. Sorry for posting misinformation.

Is that laptop market? Or combined? I wonder where Dell fits in.

In terms of the combined consumers sales, Dell is probably #3.

The revenue Dell pulled from their consumer division (which includes desktop/laptops/thin-clients/mobile devices and so on) is $8.9 billion.

> End User Computing revenue was $8.9 billion in the quarter, a 9 percent decrease. Operating income for the quarter was $224 million, a 65 percent decrease. Dell desktop and thin-client revenue declined 2 percent, mobility revenue declined 16 percent, and software from third parties and peripherals revenue declined 6 percent.

Source: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130516006383/en/Dell...

In Apple's '14 Q1 report, their Mac revenue was $6.4 billion. iPad: $11.4B and iPhone $32B for the total of ~$50B.

See my website that tracks price per TB of HDD and SSD:

http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/

That's very nice. Are you keeping historical data? These would be interesting as diagrams.

I have over two years of historical data. I'm going to make some charts.

You have laptop batteries in your SSD listings

Thanks, newegg keep messing up the categories.

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