In Red Herring's latest issue on tech trends for next year they talk about flash memory:
By 2009, flash memory will cost just two-tenths of a penny for a megabyte compared to $0.052 today, according to iSuppli.
Although the exact prices don't matter, and (as Red Herring admits) this is still more expensive than hard drives, what it does mean is that lots of fast, low-power, solid-state memory will be available for cheap. More than just for storing MP3s and DVDs, it'll allow for the storage of lots of configuration and preference information. One of the ways to make something react very quickly is to pre-calculate the results of complex calculations and then quickly access the pre-stored calculations. With cheap flash memory, for something to "learn" a behavior (say, a bed that learns your body shape and sleep patterns and adjusts accordingly) and adapt, it may only have to figure out which one of the millions of pre-calculated "profiles" it has calculated (based on everyone's favorite Baysian learning algorithm? [look I used "Baysian" twice in one day!] ;-) and then recall a whole set of patterns of adaptive behavior (for example: when it warms the bed, when it moves your feet, when it rolls you, etc.). That may be good enough for a typical experience and it will be very computationally inexpensive, thus making the CPU requirements for the device (and therefore the battery requirements, the heat requirements, etc.) quite low, allowing for the inclusion of information processing technology into all kinds of devices it previously didn't exist in. In the case of things that react at people speed, memory may well trump CPU power.
