Optane was still cheaper than DRAM modules of same capacity. And were twice larger for same price.
Really, I dream of Optane as a "super-fast swap drive" that "extends" RAM (that is what some manufacturers do with NVMe this days). Then it will be ease to have notebook with 256G "RAM" with actual 16G of DRAM and 256G Optane swap. Most users will not notice any difference compared to actual 256G DRAM since Optane is fast enough to make application switch fast. At least my Google Chrome and Intellij Idea could live in peace in such setup, each eating many gigabytes "RAM" since I don't code and watch sites at the same microsecond.
16GB optanes with an ordinary SSD interface are pretty widespread in China and DIYers do use them for swap/pagefile. The problem is that they take up a whole M.2 or NVMe slot with the corresponding number of PCIe lanes…
These drives generally come from budget laptops where the optane is originally used as the system disk. Not a good idea anyways and computer shops usually swap them out. You pay about 28 CNY for 16 GB, which is 2x the average SSD price-per-gig.
DRAM interfaced Optane wouldn't consume NVMe lanes. It should be soldered same way as usual DRAM is soldered in most non-professional (but home or bussiness) notebooks this days.
For example: MacBook M1/M2 has fixed limiter RAM. But with Optane as swap it could be four-eight times larger without user notice on difference.
Really, I dream of Optane as a "super-fast swap drive" that "extends" RAM (that is what some manufacturers do with NVMe this days). Then it will be ease to have notebook with 256G "RAM" with actual 16G of DRAM and 256G Optane swap. Most users will not notice any difference compared to actual 256G DRAM since Optane is fast enough to make application switch fast. At least my Google Chrome and Intellij Idea could live in peace in such setup, each eating many gigabytes "RAM" since I don't code and watch sites at the same microsecond.