but can they really bring that down by a factor of 10,

Of course they can.

Don't you remember when regular old desktop RAM was approaching $50 per megabyte? That was only about six years ago if if I recall correctly. How exciting it was when the price came down to a dollar a megabyte just a few years later, a 50x price reduction! And today, what does it cost? Less than a dime a megabyte. That isn't a reduction by "a factor of 10" -- that's a reduction by a factor of 500, over a period of seven or eight years.

The cost of mechanical hard drive storage has dropped by an even larger factor over the same period of time. (From over a dollar per megabyte in 1995 to under $2.00 per gigabyte today)

So, yes, I believe they can "really bring that down by a factor of 10." It may take a year or two, but it will happen.

tanstaafl.