CrunchGear reports that Apple recently, and quietly, lopped $500 off the price of the ultra-expensive, solid state disk-equipped version of the MacBook Air. The resulting $2,599 laptop is still completely insane for most regular users, compared to the much less expensive base model.

What's significant about this, though, is that it signals a move to a lower-cost manufacturing process for the 64GB solid state drives that was first hinted at last month. That's a size far beyond what most cell phones can hold—typically, cell phone storage tops out at 8GB these days on a microSD card, with some 16GB cards beginning to appear.

But 64GB is a tremendous amount of mobile media. As these prices continue to fall, expect to see the use of cell phones as media players to skyrocket, especially as everyone scrambles to make their phones work more simply—or, if anything, as much like an iPod as possible.