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.

I mean, that's the correct short-term read, but if LLMs in hyperscalers remain commercially viable to the point of tying up memory for several years, and if that necessitates an expansion of memory fabrication to satiate unmet demand, and if that demand ends up getting hoovered up by AI companies again due to their unmet or delayed demand from technological adoption, then Apple et al may not have much of a choice but to adopt such a profound strategy change.

There's a lot of 'ifs' there to be sure, but they'd be fools not to at least discuss the possibility internally and understand their options.