Where is the progress in the SSD market gone?

We are right on schedule. According to Samsung, consumer solid state drive prices will reach parity with mechanical hard drive prices in 2020. There have been several news reports about it.

Tom's Hardware published the very first review of a solid state drive in 2006. It was a Samsung prototype. It was so new it wasn't even called an ssd yet. The review noted there were a lot of problems and sent the prototype back to Samsung. It took a few years before Samsung came back with a vengeance.
We've come a long way since then.

The drop in ssd prices happened much quicker than price drops in hard disk drives. I purchased my first pc in December, 1984. It was an IBM pc that came with two 5.25 inch floppy disc drives. The following Summer I read about and purchased a Seagate 10MB (not GB) hard drive. The access time was 120 milliseconds and it cost $350.00 USD. If one were to do the math that works out to about $35,840.00 USD per GB. Back then there were no large capacity consumer hard drives.

I maintain an ssd database free of advertising that is listed in a sticky at the very top of this forum section, AnandTech (both owned by Purch), and other forums around the world. I check over 100 sites almost daily for technical reviews. The number of new models being released annually and the number of technical reviews published has definitely declined. I've also watched 3rd party ssd companies fade in and out of the market. Those are the companies that pay an actual ssd manufacturer to build ssd's for them. Most of those 3rd party ssd's are manufactured by 5 Chinese companies. Consumers wouldn't recognize the names of those Chinese manufacturers and they are not mentioned in technical reviews.

I can't get very excited about differences in Flash Memory simply because no matter what type, I cannot recall any significant problems with Flash Memory ever being mentioned in a technical review or a user forum. The real problems were usually the ssd controller, algorithms, and firmware. The veterans here will remember the problems with SandForce controllers a few years ago. I also can't get excited about ssd endurance. There is an extremely high probability technological advances will make current ssd's obsolete before the ssd's reach their endurance limits.

As for prices this Winter holiday season one can expect the price of low budget, entry level ssd's to dip a little bit below 20 US cents per GB. I've already seen that happen several times this year. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for high end ssd's. Last Winter I purchased a Samsung 950 Pro 512 GB ssd for $250.00 USD. It was part of a Newegg bundle. Luckily I was able to use the rest of the bundle components for other customer builds.