I don't know about physical size, but there's something I've always 
wondered about:

Let me pick an example at random. When USB flash drives first came out, 
64MB was about the biggest drive you would possibly buy. Today you can 
easily pick up a 4GB drive that costs less than the price of having it 
physically delivered to your house.

So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with? Why did 
they have to start by making 64MB drives, and then starting to make 
128MB drives, and then moving on to 256MB drives, and so forth? Why 
couldn't they just go directly to 4GB? What enables them to make those 
today but prevented them from making them back then?

Why do you have to design, test, manufacture and sell a 64MB drive 
before you can attempt to make a 128MB one? How does the former help you 
do the latter? Why can't you just jump straight to 4GB? (Or perhaps even 
more than that?)

I can't think of any /technical/ reason. (Besides "that's how it's 
done".) The only rational reason I can think of is that if you keep 
putting out slightly better devices year after year, people are going to 
keep upgrading their stuff, and that gives you income. If you just went 
straight out and sold the best possible device, then once everyone has 
got one, you'd have nothing new to sell to them, and you'd have no money.

Then again, cars don't improve in performance at all. Today's cars have 
performance within a few percent of cars made 40 years ago. And yet, 
people still buy cars.

I suppose a car is different to a piece of technology. Cars wear out. 
Cars are status symbols. Cars are fashion accessories. Some of that 
applies to a very limited extent to computers or phones, but it really 
doesn't apply to something like a USB flash drive.

On the other hand, pens and pencils don't improve in performance either, 
and they still sell plenty of those. Flash drives could be considered as 
being like pens. (Hell, they even /call them/ "pen drives" sometimes...)

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