I had an iPhone 12 and just upgraded to a 17 because I don't see any point waiting - prices will just increase.

> It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.

Strong disagree.

AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.

> AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.

I think generative AI is pretty neat, but I'm not sure it's worth the RAM increases. I use Claude like everyone else does, and it's cool, but I am a little concerned at how much absolute low-effort crap is being produced with it.

It has made YouTube considerably worse; there was already a lot of low-effort shit flooding it, but now it's almost cartoonish. A lot of the videos that I'm recommended will have thousands of views, and give kind of a facsimile of a video with "effort", only for me to realize about a quarter of the way through a bunch of AI tropes in the writing and/or the visuals. It has made the already-mediocre experience of YouTube actively bad.

I am also not convinced that the prices will go down after two years. We already have big memory vendors completely leaving the consumer market, and we have these AI companies buying literal years worth of entire production lines of RAM chips.

This is something that could be solved by competitors jumping in to fill the niche, but it takes a lot of time to build new factories for this stuff, I think more than two years.