As we all know there has been a shortage of the spinning hard disk drives globally. As a result most of the PC manufacturers are affected, except for Apple’s flash memory based Macbook Air which uses the NAND drives.
And as per analyst Rob Chira of Evercore, this situation puts Apple in the drivers seat as other manufacturer will be feeling the heat due to a lack of sufficient or highly priced disk drives, a situation created due to the flooding in Thailand which has badly affected disk drive manufacturing giants like Seagate and Western Digital.
Chira also notes that this will push the windows based manufacturers in copying the Macbook Air design by adopting the Intel Ultrabook specifications, and thus try to cash in on the popularity of the Macbook Air. Though Apple is expected to launch a new 15 inch version of the Macbook Air as well in the first half of 2012 to counter any such attempts from the windows based manufacturers.
Macbook Air currently makes up 28% of Apple’s notebook shipments and reportedly Apple is preparing to go the NAND way for their Macbook pro lineup as well. Apple was the quickest hardware manufacturer to reach out for the NAND drive and this puts them in an advantageous position with the supply chain.
Though it must be added that even Apple will be surely affected by the shortage and the resultant increase in the prices of the disk drives as their build to order iMacs with 2-tearbyte hard drives now take an estimated shipping time of 5 to 7 weeks. Whatever maybe the circumstances, Apple surely is on its way to be the number one PC manufacturer in the year 2012.