Apple Inc. may sell zippy notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard disk drives, an analyst said today. In a separate report, LG Electronics Inc. is also said to be planning the release of a laptop this month that uses a hybrid (flash/spinning disk) drive. The laptop news comes in the same week that Samsung Electronics Co. announced it was shipping its first so-called hybrid drive, which uses a combination of nonvolatile NAND flash memory and magnetic spinning disk to save on power consumption and boot-up time (see ‘ Samsung ships its first hybrid disk drive ‘). Samsung is the world’s largest maker of NAND flash memory for gadgets such as USB flash drives. Apple hopes to introduce so-called flash memory in small computers known as subnotebooks in the second half of 2007, Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research Inc., said in investor notes yesterday and today. A shift to flash memory for storage in place of much slower hard disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers. Apple already […]