Normal consumer workloads are heavily biased towards 4K random performance (especially read). Sequential performance is largely inconsequential, both because it's rare (how often do you really suck in a full 20+ GB file at a single go?) and because consumer SSDs are fast enough at sequential performance that it's not really a bottleneck. 500 MB/s sustained is really fast enough for most users.
Streaming video from the internet does not use the SSD at all, and a high-quality 1080p video file is maybe 5-10 MB/s of bitrate, you can easily pull that off a spinning HDD that was manufactured 20 years ago.
Video editing at 4K or 8K is one of the few use-cases where NVMe's sequential performance does provide a big benefit... assuming you are not editing using proxies.
Optane's QD=1 random-4K performance does present an opportunity for big speedups on consumer use-cases. But Intel really has to get the prices down if they want to see consumer adoption, right now there is an obvious benefit to cheaper SATA SSDs that allow you to get more data off spinning-rust drives vs a smaller, massively expensive Optane drive (even if it is incredibly fast).
Streaming video from the internet does not use the SSD at all, and a high-quality 1080p video file is maybe 5-10 MB/s of bitrate, you can easily pull that off a spinning HDD that was manufactured 20 years ago.
Video editing at 4K or 8K is one of the few use-cases where NVMe's sequential performance does provide a big benefit... assuming you are not editing using proxies.
Optane's QD=1 random-4K performance does present an opportunity for big speedups on consumer use-cases. But Intel really has to get the prices down if they want to see consumer adoption, right now there is an obvious benefit to cheaper SATA SSDs that allow you to get more data off spinning-rust drives vs a smaller, massively expensive Optane drive (even if it is incredibly fast).