It's not on the main PCB to give them the ability to use different parts from different suppliers.The Storage in the Air is a SATA interfaced SSD.Instead it's cheaper to play the major flash producers against each other to get the lowest cost. If they thought they could get a better price manufacturing their own flash, they'd have their own plant - or ten. The flash market is so volatile right now that they can't lock themselves into just one supplier, especially since some 80% of Apple's revenue comes from products that use copious amounts of flash. The pinouts and circuitry are different between the samsung and toshiba flash controllers, so they can't build them into the main PCB as Apple would prefer, without locking them into one vendor or the other. They need this because the SSD is one of the few things in the Air that requires custom PCB layout and comes from multiple suppliers. When they get a poor price from one, they go to the other. They have both Toshiba and Samsung on the line for supplying these SSDs. The reason Apple uses a custom form factor SSD is for size, weight, and - most important to Apple - cost. OS X does, however, understand it as an SSD and treats it slightly differently from a hard drive in order to use it to its full potential, but in every other respect it's just a custom form factor SSD. It's a custom form-factor SSD, but it uses a SATA flash controller, and the Air reads it just as if it were any other SATA drive. But they do know what a "flash drive" is, and due to aggressive marketing they believe it's better than the alternative. The typical consumer Apple is aiming for does not know what SSD is, nor do they care. Apple markets it as merely flash memory because in the consumer market there are only two storage types - flash and hard drives. How does the use flash memory compare to SSDs? What are the benefits? What is the benefit of using flash memory in the Macbook Air?
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