You're thinking like an MBA and dismissing the biggest factors
Writing to DRAM is much, much faster than writing to SSD, also reliability (in the sense that you can use chips with defective cells in SSDs).
You mentioned those factors but you're not giving them enough importance. Market factors are important, but the price is not going to be less than cost.
I'm thinking like an MBA here because that's how you have to think in order to reason about the price something has.
Yes, those factors are important! But are they also the main driver of cost? I don't know.
Could we have speed, reliabaility and size? That is a technological question. I don't have the answer to that.
Would enough people care to pay for speed, reliability and size? That's more of an MBA question and the answer probably is no.
The example given is: People pay extra to have 1 TB of flash in their machine but they are OK with only having 16 GB of RAM. The priority is even to have a lower power consumption instead of having 32 GB of RAM.
While you are right that we maybe cannot deliver the technology on a pure technological stance, you kind of miss the point. Even if we could, we wouldn't do it because of the MBAs driving the fincances in a certain direction based on (perceived) market forces.
The question was: "Why are flash memory prices going down so much faster than RAM?"
Answer: because there are (technological) ways of making it cheaper (and probably slower/less reliable, but not much), as well as economy of scale factors
Why DRAM doesn't get cheaper: because it has to follow much stricter requirements.
The question itself is naive. It thinks "megabytes of memory" are the same thing regardless of form factor
> Would enough people care to pay for speed, reliability and size? That's more of an MBA question and the answer probably is no.
Yes, probably not. Not the masses at least. Unless they buy Apple, they (still) care about this mostly, apart from adapter shenanigans
Writing to DRAM is much, much faster than writing to SSD, also reliability (in the sense that you can use chips with defective cells in SSDs).
You mentioned those factors but you're not giving them enough importance. Market factors are important, but the price is not going to be less than cost.