Could it be that Apple, having placed an order for some 50 million 8Gb flash chips, is planning to sell rather a lot of the new iPhone 3Gs? At the very least it will mean that the competition, such as Samsungs other customers, will have to go hang.
Indeed, Samsung has been warning them that NAND flash is about to become pretty scarce for a while.
Looking at the math, and remembering that 8Gb is the same as 1GB, it works out to enough flash to build either 3 million 16GB iPhone 3G handsets or 6 million 8GB iPhone 3G handsets. Or, of course, a combination of the two.
Given that Apple predicts it will sell some 10 million iPhones before the year is out, it looks like the NAND shortage could get worse before it gets any better.
