Don't look now, but the always-innovative Apple corporation may shake the playing field and change the way we look at laptops and at the same time force hard disk manufacturers to lower their prices.

Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research says that Apple will soon sell blazing-fast laptops which use flash memory as the main storage device instead of the traditional hard disk. The idea is patterned after the popular iPod mp3 players of the company which use precisely that kind of storage medium.

Flash memory is much faster than the hard drives of today. This means that if the project materializes, long start-up times and file transfers may be a thing of the past. This, Wu says, will put pressure on hard drive makers to improve their wares and at the same time lower their prices to compete with the flash memory market.

Further, flash memory comes in a smaller package, is lighter and more energy-efficient than a bulky hard disk. It also doesn't have spinning parts, which makes it less prone to wear and tear. That means a much sleeker notebook is possible, all the while extending battery life.

The storage capacity of the new notebook's flash memory is yet to be determined, but knowing Apple, experts say that it should be pretty good. The machine will be running on a miniature OS X especially configured for the hardware.

Seeing the initiative from Apple, Wu challenged the flash memory industry, saying "Apple, from what we understand, is pretty much ready. The ball is in the flash vendors' court."