we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory I've run diskless, boot-from-network systems with 2 to 4 GB RAM with

we're getting to the point where you could copy the entire working set of the OS to memory I've run diskless, boot-from-network systems with 2 to 4 GB RAM with the entire OS+data+servers in memory. If you know your exact sizes, you don't need giant RAM. As far as desktop or interactive systems go, in 2009 I made a desktop with 24 GB RAM which essentially never read from the disk after everything got cached appropriately. save to disk periodically. That's what your kernel does. There's a long history of flushing dirty pages back to disk. My dream machine would be It looks like you want a MacBook Pro from 3 years ago?