The six-week waiting list to get a popular iPod Mini digital music player from Apple Computer is likely to get shorter by the end of the year.
Hitachi's hard disk drive unit said on Sunday that it will spend about $200 million to double the disk drive output of its Thailand factory, including the one-inch, four-gigabyte disk drives that are found in the iPod Mini.
Production of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' Microdrive will rise to about two million units per quarter by the end of the year, from 200,000 in the first three months of this year, said Mr John Osterhout, who manages Hitachi GST's Microdrive program.
In March, Apple said it would delay global sales of the iPod Mini because it could not get enough of the hard drives to meet US demand, which had then surpassed supply through June. Apple now plans to sell iPod outside the United States starting in July.
Apple's online store shows an approximate six-week wait for one of the popular music players, which come in five metallic colours. They cost $249 each, and the 4-gigabyte hard drive holds the equivalent of about 1,000 songs.