Despite the rise of ultrabooks and the fall in the price of SSDs, there are still very few laptops that are equipped with SSDs, concludes market researcher iSuppli after research. Most laptops have 500GB HDDs.
Nearly a third of all notebooks sold in the first quarter contained a 500GB hard drive and were priced in the range of $450 to $550. concludes iSuppli based on own market research. Cheaper $350-450 laptops with 320GB HDDs then take the bulk of the pie, followed by the $550-650 segment with 640GB drives.
Laptops with 128GB SSDs and ‘high-end HDDs’, which probably mean hard drives with a speed of 10,000 rpm, only have a 3 percent share according to iSuppli. The price of these laptops is currently at $900 or higher. “The market share shows that notebook computers with SSDs such as Apple’s MacBook Air do not currently pose a threat to the large landscape of HDD-based mobile PCs,” the conclusion reads.
According to the research company, the share will only increase significantly when the price level of laptops with SSDs comes to around 700 dollars. At the moment, the price of ultrabooks is falling to this price level, but these are systems where a hard disk is supplemented with a flash disk with little capacity. These types of laptops with hybrid storage media were not included in the study.