hitThe two blind graders disagreed (A: hit, B: partial). A third agent settled it (D20).
Grader A: hit
The small body-carried computers of 2009 (phones, smartphones, flash music players) used flash memory and had no moving parts; the iPhone 3GS shipped only with 8-32 GB flash, and 1.8-inch and smaller hard disks were discontinued around 2010. Notebooks still mostly used hard disks, so the claim holds for the small devices the passage refers to, not for laptops.
Test: At least 50% of new handheld units shipping with solid-state memory only: smartphones and phones were effectively all flash in 2009.
Hard disk drive (Wikipedia) (retrieved 2026-09): NAND flash supplanted HDDs in portable applications; 1.8-inch and smaller HDDs were discontinued around 2010; SSD revenue passed HDD only in 2018.
Grader B: partial
Phones, smartphones and most media players used flash memory and had no drives. Notebooks, the main portable computers, still shipped with spinning hard drives in 2009; SSDs were a premium option and became standard in laptops only after 2014.
Test: Device test: phones >50% flash-only (hit); notebooks with SSD well under 50% of 2009 shipments and not majority by 2014.
Wikipedia: iPhone (1st generation) (accessed 2026-09-28): 2007 iPhone: flash storage, multi-touch screen, no physical keyboard; 6.1M units sold to mid-2008.
Wikipedia: Solid-state drive (accessed 2026-09-28): Gives no 2009 laptop SSD share; SSDs in 2009 were a premium option, HDDs standard in notebooks.
Wikipedia: Netbook (accessed 2026-09-28): Netbooks from late 2007 weighed about 0.9-1 kg; peaked near 20% of portable PC market.
All captured fields
rank
6
kind
decade_prediction
section
Computers
subject
No moving parts, electronic memory
target year
2009
timing
in
position
Chapter 9, "2009"; item Computers 6 in Kurzweil 2010, p. 15
confidence
high
note
Wording as reproduced by the author in "How My Predictions Are Faring" (2010); book page not given there. Subject label is the essay's own item heading.