This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet.

As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer because most compute-based products have matured, with CPUs not seeing substantial gains and memory usage really only expanding at the absolute top end of workloads pre-LLMs (3D and HPC in particular). An iPhone 14 still has almost all the features of the iPhone 17, because the compute capabilities are remarkably similar; Geekbench shows a performance delta of ~25-30% between the 14 and 17 Pro Max models, which is pretty paltry considering the devices are separated by four years of manufacturing improvements. This extends into desktops, laptops, tablets, STBs, and more, with only VR devices and larger ARM/RISC-based kit seeing more substantial uplifts as general designs improve.

So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. Even if LLMs fail spectacularly and all that memory capacity becomes available, HBM memory likely isn't to find its way into many consumer devices (just ask AMD how it worked out for them on consumer GCN GPUs).

The name of the game, especially for consumers, is efficiency - "potato builds", as I've been calling them. Software and services optimized for lower power, smaller-specced devices of increasing age instead of pandering to flagship devices with poorly optimized code or engines for the sake of new shinies (like Raytracing). Between the memory shortage, shifting geopolitics, rising costs, and stagnant wages, consumer purchasing power is going to be squeezed like a vice for the foreseeable future, and businesses will need to adapt around that reality.

  So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year.

For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.

I don’t think Apple will stop releasing new iPhone Pros every year. The business is too big.