What can $3500 buy you? A lot, for sure, but it can also get you a USB memory stick that is a mere 128MB - 1GB in size. A bit much? Yes, but for White Lake, a gold-plated jewel-adorned kit is worth just that. The memory sticks are hand crafted by a jeweler, and can feature both gold and diamonds, making them some of the most "luxurious" PC accessories available to date. Now normally this is news more on the extravagant side that we don't want to hear much about, but some, including myself, see this as an example of how quickly the computing world has gone from nothing but geek to very mainstream, and even to the extremely exotic.
Much like someone driving around a Bentley with more horsepower than they'd ever need, the PC industry may find a way around extremely low hardware costs - fancy parts. No word on how these sticks make it to retail, but they will be demo'ed at the March 9th CeBIT show.