Revenues for the SSD market (including low-cost PC solutions) worldwide totaled US$585 million in 2008, rising over 100% from US$259 million in 2007, according to a recent report released by Gartner. PC applications contributed around 58% to the total market for SSDs last year.

Samsung Electronics led the market with 31.7% revenue market share in 2008, up 14.8 percentage points from 16.9% in 2007, the Gartner report shows. The research firm attributed the significant share growth to increased adoption of Samsung’s drives in mainstream PC models.

STEC was second with 15.7% last year, according to the report. In addition to OEM orders placed by EMC and Sun Microsystems, STEC has recently cut into the supply chain with SSDs used in Apple’s products. Meanwhile, SanDisk came in third with 9.4%, facing tougher competition from recent entrant Intel. Intel climbed to fourth with 6.9% in 2008, compared to less than 1% that it took in 2007. (continuare…)

With Microsoft Windows 7 in its rearview mirror, Apple is making Snow Leopard an inexpensive operating system upgrade for Mac users.

Philip Schiller, senior VP of worldwide marketing, told attendees at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco Monday that for $29 they can upgrade from the current Mac OS X, Leopard. The new version boasts better performance and a number of enhancements, most notably delivery of a full 64-bit kernel. Apple also is offering a “family pack” of up to five Snow Leopard licenses for $49.

Schiller also announced September availability of the new OS, a month before Microsoft releases Windows 7. Analysts have been impressed with Microsoft’s follow-up to Windows Vista and say Windows 7 is likely to present the greatest challenge to Mac OS X. (continuare…)

Netbook vendors are considering keeping their Intel Atom N270 and N280-based netbooks using Windows XP and will not offer upgrades to Windows 7 due to increasing costs and low consumer demand, according to industry sources.

The current price of Windows XP OEM version is only around US$25-30, but the latest quotes from Microsoft for the netbook version of Windows 7 is around US$45-55 and therefore first-tier vendors are unable to transfer the cost to the netbooks’ sales price due to the fierce competition.

The first-tier notebook vendors are still negotiating with Microsoft hoping to bring the price down.

Since most consumers think Windows XP is enough to handle their needs in a netbook, the Upgrade to Windows 7 Program will provide less incentive to attract consumers to purchase netbooks.

Currently, most netbook vendors are focusing on only adopting Windows 7 in their next generation Atom N450-based netbooks, while some vendors are considering offer upgrades for their N280-based products.

In additional news, Intel plans to announce the single-core Atom D410 and dual-core Atom D510 for nettops in October 2009 replacing the current Atom 230 and 330. Atom 230 and 330 will be phased out in the first quarter of 2010.