Finally, it was a big mistake for Apple not to include ECC memory support in at least the "Pro" desktops. IBM has good engineers, but they come from a background that assumes that anything with a large amount of RAM uses ECC as an engineering best practice. Apple felt they "needed" to save the 15% or so ECC adds to the memory price tag so they special ordered a Northbridge not supporting it for the desktop machines. (Smart move, guys.) Intel *should* probably push PC makers into using ECC in their desktop machines, but since they don't they've gotten pretty good at making memory controllers reliable enough to do without it.

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I'm not sure how relevant ECC is to desktop computers or even workstations. Current usage of such devices is primarily for "light computing" with the odd bit of audio and video processing. For those use cases, having an occasional bit flip (which we know is extraordinarily rare) is unimportant to the work that is being generated. Having RAM that causes the computer to crash and burn in the extreme failure case may provide a better indication to a normal user than incomprehensible system software logs.

For servers, ECC makes a lot of sense. If you're holding financial records or any sort of database in RAM, a bit flip can be expensive. And you're paying for admins or a software package to monitor your server, aren't you?

If you put ECC memory controllers in desktop PCs, what sort of quality control do you expect? I guess that Intel would do a good job overall (some of their ICH chipsets have problems, if you remember) and there'll be some horrible cheap offerings.