This week, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch all published rumors that Apple plans to launch a smaller, more affordable iPhone, to be sold alongside the iPhone 4. (We predicted as much six weeks ago.)
The WSJ also reported that MobileMe is getting a major revamp in June, allowing users to store most of their data and media in the cloud. We’ve heard the same thing from several sources.
Firstly, according to our source (who asked to remain anonymous), Apple has been working on a smaller, mass-market iPhone for a long time. But to do that, Apple had to figure out a way to strip away some of the components to reduce both its size and cost.
Apple decided to lose some of the memory, which is by far the most expensive component of the iPhone (up to one-quarter of the device’s cost, according to iSuppli estimates).
By “some” of the memory, we mean ALL of the memory. The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud.
“I’m talking strictly storage memory here,” said our source. The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com, a streaming service that Apple bought last spring and then shut down.
Parole Fatti Pensieri
