#1) As was mentioned above - video editing. As soon as DVD writers have prices that drop to under $100 they will become almost a standard in new computers. About that same time the ~700 MHz computers will be roughly 5 years old and starting to struggle. So even my grandparents might want to take a movie of their great-grandchildren, plop it into their computer, and have a DVD made. Good video editing requires a fast CPU.
Yeah, until an MPEG-2 encode takes less than 10 seconds, CPUs will always be too slow. Some people seem to think all we do is work in Word and surf the net. One can set up a simple DVD in minutes (assuming all the video content is already there), but the encoding can take just about forever. Given that MiniDV camcorders are now the norm, it's VERY necessary for the masses to have faster CPUs.
And also, by the time DVD recorders are the norm and 6 GHz computers are the norm too, they'll still be too slow. Already, I wish I could make high definition videos. 720x480 on a DVD is fairly limiting, and my TV is more than capable of showing much higher resolutions.
Why would Harddrives be a bottleneck? With Serial-ATA around the corner and new Hard Drives with 8MB Cache's finding a good harddrive will be the least of our worries. IMHO most consumers dont need 60Gigs or higher.
Huh? Whachoo been smokin? Hard drives are excruitiatingly slow, when compared to the rest of the system as a whole. Serial ATA means nothing if a high end IDE drive can't even break ATA66 speeds. The whole reason Microsoft recommends 512 MB or more of memory for XP is so that then we don't have to swap out to disk so much when multitasking.
Most consumers may not need 60 GBs (for now) of hard drive space, but a lot do, again esp. the MiniDV owners. A couple of hours of baby videos takes up a hell of a lot of space.
Back in the old days, a single CD-ROM was considered a HUGE amount of information. Now it's passe. And my first computer had a total of 48
KB. All my software for that computer probably is less than 20
MB. Now I have over 200
GB of storage for my home computer.
One can never have too much speed or too much storage. Progress is a wonderful thing.