I wrote a speculative post last September saying that laptops with flash drives instead of hard disk would ship in 2006.

According to an article in Gearlog, Asus has just started shipping a flash based laptop!

It is still very expensive

The disk alone is being sold at DVnation for a painful $1199, which is half the value of the notebook(ouch)

and only has one 16gb flash disk, but it is the beginning. My first computer had a 40mb hard drive and 1mb of ram – who measures in megabytes these days?

Advances in flash storage are happening fast – expect flash based laptops to be a viable alternative in under five years.