Apple’s tear as the leader of the MP3 market is facing competition on an old fashioned front. Not the the music web store front, but instead in good old fashioned consumer electronic commodities like flash.

San Disk has released new Sansa players with twice the amount of flash as the Apple Nano and slashed their prices at the same time.

“The most costly ingredient in a flash-based (music) player is the flash memory,” said Eric Bone, director of audio/video product marketing at SanDisk. “Since we make the flash memory, we essentially remove the middleman and pass that savings directly to the consumer.”

Apple is going to have to fend off Microsoft on the content front and fight another battle on the flash commodity front, while attempting to settle border disputes in the mobile phone and video segments of personal players as well.

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It’s Sunday night and I’m going to diverge just a bit from my normal topics - just a bit. I spend a significant amount of time doing research and work on the computer and on the internet. I’m not getting any younger and I’m learning that I have to spend extra attention to keeping myself healthy.

This means that I’m running several times a week. I’m taking vitamins. I’m trying to cut back on Coke Zero and more. I learned the hard way last year that spending too much time sitting, drinking cafeine (Coke Zero) and popping claritin to keep my allergies in check it a very very bad combination. I’ll spare you the details, just trust me and don’t mix the three to excess.

Now Claritin was a wonder drug for me. It allowed me to calm my sinuses down for a couple years and the break from constant allergy and sinus attacks has allowed me to live and breathe easier. That said, I can’t take claritin like vitamins and so I’m getting even more proactive. I’ve put in the hypo alergenic filters in the heater/aircondition. I’ve got a Dyson vacuum ~ the animal version for picking up dog hair as my business partner is part dauchsund part golden retriever and hair happens with dogs. (Not to mention that with 2 adults and 3 kids in the house, there’s a lot of dust.)

I’m not Howard Hughes by a long shot, but adding one of those ionic air filters is a good extra touch. My grand parents picked one of these up a couple years ago from a TV add. They raived and raived about it, but honestly I did the stupid grandson thing and ignored their well intentioned advice (I don’t do that much actually, but on occassion I revert back to some early period in my life when I didn’t consider the wisdom of my elders.) My parents picked up a air filter/fan shaped like the ionic filter my grandparents had, but it cost about $50.

Thing of it is it didn’t do much and I started to learn that the ionic breeze was worth the money. (Think my grandparents paid about $300 back then.) Fortunately, for me they have come down in price and now I’ve got one more edge arming me to stay healthy and keep productive. Working as a consultant and freelance writer means that if I’m sick, there’s no benefits to cover me and no sick days. I just don’t make any forward progress, so staying healthy is all that much more important.

You might say that I even learned a little from the wisdom of my elders and got the pro version, Ionic Pro.

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