According to market research firm Gartner, the price for solid state drives will likely drop below a dollar per gigabyte by the second half of 2012 – this may mean larger entry-level sizes in devices such as the MacBook Air.
It also might see SSD’s becoming more standard across the board/ It appears that the SSD revolution is firmly upon us, my friends – as prices drop and production increases, I believe we will see the phaseout of mechanical media entirely, except for in long-term storage applications.
This is really good news, and not just for the MacBook Air. An SSD is buck-for-buck the best performance upgrade you can make on a machine, and prices continuing to drop will just maximize that value, as well as make it more likely that Apple will make SSDs in their other computers as ubiquitous as it is in the Air.
Even with this in mind, however, prices have a long way to fall before SSD’s can be considered as being truly competitive to traditional, spinning hard drives, which remain at a fraction of the cost.