Samsung is reportedly looking to obtain its role as a major NAND flash supplier for Apple’s iPhone lineup once again. Such a deal would be lucrative and one that would significantly help the company this year due to several looming hardware refreshes. Sources that are familiar with Samsung’s operations told The Korea Times that the company is in negotiations to supply NAND flash memory for Apple’s next iPhone and is already performing quality control component testing at its factory in Xian, China.
Another source is claiming that the move is meant to capitalize on Apple’s supposed plans to boost mid-tier iPhone storage capacities. This person ends up citing cloud services, a feature that is usually attributed with freeing up onboard memory requirements, as “data-intensive” and the reason for the impending change. Samsung is supposedly aiming at the 64 GB chips for what it is currently Apple’s mid-tier iPhone offering.
With all being said and done, Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing, is actually taking an opposite stance, defending relatively low-capacity 16 GB iPhones. Schiller said the following during an unofficial WWDC panel with John Gruber of Daring Fireball regarding the matter:
The belief is more and more as we use iCloud services for documents and our photos and videos and music that perhaps the most price-conscious customers are able to live in an environment where they don't need gobs of local storage because these services are lightening the load.
We’ll have to wait and see how the efforts turn out.
Source: The Korea Times via AppleInsider
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