Bill Gates is quoted on The Register as saying "64 bit is coming to desktops, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology. Right now, it is costly." Smacks of "640Kb of memory is all you will ever need".