Why can't we dedicate more storage memory to program memory?

[schettj]

Just to add a little perspective, looking at the apple touch/iphone

128mb RAM
On boot, darwin locks down 16MB ram for itself, leaving 112mb for everything else... then the OS loads up.... eating roughly 88-94mb ram to get to the pretty springboard (icons, aka "today") screen. Like WM, iMacOSX (or whatever you call it) apps don't actually close, generally, when you go home. Apps like safari (web) eat that last 22MB like candy.

So yeah, WM5/6 is a hog. But there are other hogs out there. It does make sense to just give up on the wimpy 64mb ram though - it's 2007, we have terabyte drives selling for $120 and a 4gb stick of ram is $100, for heaven's sake!