The changes can come in different ways.

Hybrid machines -- systems with both a hard drive and solid state drive -- will help keep product prices down. For example, a lower-capacity SSD can be used for loaded an operating system and applications, while a high-capacity hard drive can still be used as its mass storage device, Reichmann said.

Regardless of price, however, having a hard drive may be seen as a disadvantage in the future.

"If Apple can nail the cloud, then having a huge hard drive on board in any system is much less valuable. Hard drive adds weight, expense and risk," Reichmann said. "Remember, you're walking around with all of your data, as opposed to having it in a cloud that may be more secure."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at , send e-mail to or subscribe to .