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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Well, with iCloud in place Apple could start weaning users off massive local storage, reducing significant hardware costs. What with the biggest reason for local storage being one's iTunes library, and Match alleviating the practical need for storing all that music/video on expensive spacious & speedy storage, why not plan for OS X & iTunes to ease offloading content (most of which is little used) and relieve the need for most of the Air's flash memory?

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I'd hardly call the 64 GB in the $999 model "massive". I still know a lot of people who won't make the switch to an Air due to the lack of an optical drive, and reducing the already small hard disk capacity would reduce the attractiveness of the Air to those folks even further. Also, I don't think iCloud and iTunes Match are good enough (yet) to convince people that the don't really need a hard drive anymore.

Personally I am waiting for them to put floppies back in laptops. Seriously, Air will never get a built in optical drive and you either accept that and use the USB drive once a year when you need it or you just go and buy a different laptop, but for everyone else they are picking up the air in massive numbers and it is clearly the direction laptops are heading.

I have a macbook pro that came with a built in optical drive, but I still spent the extra money (and time) to remove it and replace it with a second drive.

SSD's dropped in price precipitously. What used to cost about $140 (that 64GB drive) now costs about $40-55 bucks.

I could see them continue to sell this years model with perhaps a cost reduce step or two just like they do the iPhone 3GS.

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