>> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with?
>>
>
> When they started making flash memory chips, the manufacturing technology was
> not as advanced as it is now.

So the question "why wasn't hardware more advanced back then?" has the 
answer "manufacturing technology was not as advanced back then". Which 
immediately provokes the question "why wasn't the manufacturing 
technology more advanced back then?"

> Nowadays processes have much better yield and much smaller structure sizes which
> means you can have a higher storage density.

I'm fairly sure that back when they were selling 64MB flash drives, it 
was already common for a PC to have multiple GB of RAM. So clearly the 
feature sizes already existed.

> If I'm correct you do work in a research facility. So even you're not a
> researcher you should know how research works.
> You start researching, get a workable product with low performance. To finance
> further research, you start selling it, knowing that you can do better.
> Performance keeps improving, prices drop and so on.

I can understand how something /complicated/ - like, say, a processor - 
would take time. Inventing a new feature takes a lot of R&D. But just 
making the transistors smaller? I don't really see why they have to 
shrink in tiny little baby steps. Why not just go the whole hog straight 
away?

Part of the answer is manufacturing process, which just takes us back to 
where we started - now we're arguing about a different bit of hardware. ;-)

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