"Endurance is a key factor that's been impeding the take-up of solid-state drives since flash memory wears out if it's written too many times."
this is all cool stuff, but cool in a geeky way and not significant for the market, i think, except in an "incremental improvement" sense. yeah, flash wears out if you write the same bits more than 10,000 times. but that hasn't stopped its adoption (the drives generally move things around enough so that the same bits are not rewritten frequently and 10k writes is a whole lot over the lifetime of a device). greater speed is cool, but hasn't impeded adoption because we're looking at replacing magnetic disks with solid state disks: the difference in speed is already several orders of magnitude. same for power.
the real issue is cost. buy one of the new macs with SSD and you pay $3k (versus $2k for one with magnetic drive), and you get only 64GB storage (versus 80GB for magnetic drive). comparing apples and apples, SSDs give you better speed, power utilization, weight, but for the cost of one of these drives you can get several terabytes of magnetic storage.
"The bad news is that Intel is flatly refusing to give details on pricing or a release date for actual devices."
cost is *the* essential issue that will drive the market for SSDs.
