So here is the odd thing: servers are (often) managed by Trained Proffesionals, and have backups and failovers.
Personal computers are, well, not like that. And yet they often have peoples important creative works, correspondence etc on them. ECC is probably more useful there, it's just that it is harder to make any benefit visible to the customer.
(That doesn't mean customers don't care about realiability. It is just that they have no sane way of distinguishing a product that really is realiable from one with advertising that lies about being reliable).
Servers accumulate bitflips over long periods of time because they run 24/7. If you reboot your computer every few days to clear the memory then it's not going to be a significant problem.
Running 24/7 is not that relevant. It's the number of writes/refreshes on a given bit of information that matters. A server running 24/7 and a laptop, both reading/converting/writing image files have the same chance to corrupt each single image. The server has more chances to corrupt its cached executables though, since they have longer lifetime.
The need for ECC has nothing to do with maintenance or proper administration.
You really don't need ECC as normal user, most of the time bit flips won't really hurt you. However, if, for example, you run long-running tasks like 3D rendering or Physical Simulations you may want ECC just to be sure your OS won't be killed by a bit flip in the wrong section. Your photo gallery or music collection however will most likely never be hurt by something like that, so still, consumers don't need to waste their money on overpriced ECC memory.
> Your photo gallery or music collection however will most likely never be hurt by something like that
Citation needed that people don't care about their photos and music. Human error and storage failures are more likely sources of loss but we're a big industry and can make progress on more than one thing at a time.
> consumers don't need to waste their money on overpriced ECC memory
If ECC went mainstream, prices would drop as volume increased.
Except that ECC is insufficient because some Rowhammer attacks can flip more than two bits per memory word. The proper mitigation seems to be TRR (target row refresh).
