The fact that ECC isn't the default across everything is a failure of human cognition and Capitalism.
Hello user, for an extra 10 dollars, would you like to guarantee that cosmic radiation never affects your computing experience, including having to reformat, reinstall, or otherwise reboot your phone/computer randomly when one day something just doesn't work anymore?
Was it an update? Was it cosmic radiation? Was it a bad capacitor? Who knows!
Why do you think so many problems are solved by rebooting? Sure 99 out of 100 might be software bugs, but the other 1 out of 100 is straight up cosmic radiation, and that 1 percent is growing more and more every year as software becomes more robust and bug free with better tooling.
So your hypothetical dialogue will sound more like a scam to a regular user. You're charging money to tackle a problem they don't have or see, only addressing a single one of the root causes that trigger that same result, and in the end you're not even completely fixing it, just reducing the already infinitesimal odds it happens.
It will become mainstream when manufacturers just decides to include it everywhere and not really give the user a choice. Apple is a prime candidate for a company with enough clout to afford this.
>2009 Google's paper "DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study" says that there can be up to 25000-75000 one-bit FIT per Mbit (failures in time per billion hours), which is equal to 1 - 5 bit errors per hour for 8GB of RAM after my calculations. Paper says the same: "mean correctable error rates of 2000–6000 per GB per year".
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what...
I believe bitflips are far more common than people realize. I see weird shit all the time from my users that is only explainable due to bizarre software bugs or bitflips.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for ECC memory, I practically showed the value of ECC after intentionally running the same multi-day Matlab job several times on a non-ECC machine with different results just to prove this very point. But you use your deeper knowledge to assume what someone with shallow knowledge and interest wants or needs, and that will almost always be off mark. Your car does not have a roll cage. Normal computers do not have ECC memory.
For ECC, there's no reason to really expect that adding ECC to everything would really make things too expensive or slow long term. For a long time the reason why desktops did not have ECC was pretty much because intel wanted people who really need ECC to buy Xeons.
Exactly like how we try to recreate the effect of ECC hardware but without its "weight" (cost, complexity). For a problem that's not nearly as visible or life and death.
> too expensive or slow long term
Not "too" expensive long term still means more expensive especially short term, like when the person buys it. For an issue no average consumer is actually frustrated about. Why are we still debating why those consumers don't care about ECC? How is it different from hot swappable RAM for the average Joe? They'll upgrade or expand their RAM more often than they'll get frustrated about the effect of bitflips. So why not have hot swappable memory? Because as much as I'd love hot swappable anything, regular consumers neither care about it nor want to pay for it.
I don't know the same argument could be made and ecc be swapped with surge protectors and people still purchase those.