The dirt issue seems much worse with normal scroll mice. Bacon remnants are fairly easy to wipe (or indeed, lick) off a smooth surface like a touch pad. Once any amount of dirt gets into the mechanical bits of a scroll wheel, you're left with the option of putting up with a sticky scroll wheel, or buying a new mouse.

The tactile feedback part is exactly how I feel, though.

A valid point. Although, CPU and SLI charge hilarious premiums for something that could be a real competitive advantage for a gamer, i.e. frame rate. It would be a harder sell to convince a gamer that 1337 loading times will lead to similarly 1337 headshot percentages.

For whatever reason, SSDs are still expensive. If the reason is material and basic process costs, then I concede and will agree that improving the value of an SSD should be done through improved performance. However, I don't think this is the issue, so the right direction ought to be bringing costs down, without entirely sacrificing SSD advantages.

Some manufacturers are doing this by pairing premium controllers with non-premium NAND MLC (a la OCZ Agility). I'll say it again: Transfer rates are important, but the current SATA limits are already high enough that an SSD operating at SATA limits is ludicriously expensive (for consumers). Therefore, it makes little sense to go beyond SATA right now.

First, are there really small businesses who need this kind of performance, same question for Universities?

The CPU comparison is just apples to oranges. The primarily competitor for SSDs, right now, is HDDs. So HDDs:SDDs = x86 CPUs:? Even if I take your analogy is valid, the only reason processors come down in price so fast, is because they sell about a bazillion (rough estimate) of their actually affordable processors, recoup their R&D and optimize their yields.

> With that kind of attitude 640K would be enough for anyone.
Because I opine that they are innovating in the wrong direction, I therefore also believe no one should ever innovate?

In the scope of a consumer product, I can't think of many common workloads that would really benefit from a PCIe interface. The innovation of using PCIe as a SSD interface created a nice middle point between DRAM and RAID volumes. Such a middle point just seems totally unnecessary right now in the consumer market. The biggest issue for SSD adoption faced by most people is price, so its not defeatest to say that price should be the focus of products that actually get to market. As previous posters have pointed out, the "wow factor" of SSDs - even bound by SATA limitations - are already plenty to convince consumers that there's something worthwhile there. Trying to further up the wow factor to increase the value of these devices is way closer to the diminishing returns part of the graph than lower prices.