Mannerisms

This week Dell brought out a laptop with the option of a solid state drive. The option costs an extra $549. For a 32GB drive.

Last month Fujitsu brought out a laptop with the option of a solid state drive. That option cost an extra $1,300. Also for 32GB.

Now an 8Gb NAND flash chip is selling for $8 in the spot market. So 1GB of NAND costs $8. So the flash content of a 32GB drive costs $256.

So Dell and Fujitsu are putting on a pretty hefty mark-up, reminiscent of a restaurateur's mark-up on a bottle of plonk.

Obviously Dell and Fujitsu have decided they're not trying to seed a market with keen pricing. Instead they're trying to soak the carriage trade who don't give a 4X about price.

Apart from performing 23 per cent faster and booting up 34 per cent faster, Dell isn't claiming much for its SSDs.

Which is all a bit of a pity. One would have thought that availability of cheap, dense, NAND would have inspired the laptop people to have come out with some innovative form factors.

Maybe they will. But it's not a very promising start.