Comment by majormajor
2 hours ago
In the last ten years laptop memory footprints have, what, doubled at the low end? Smallest MacBook Pro in 2016 was 8GB, smallest is 16GB today? Max I think has gone up 8x meanwhile, 16 to 128?
I wonder if there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue where there wasn't much that demanded 10x the RAM, so there wasn't much pressure to develop more or increase production to support it at consumer prices.
There's wayyyyyyy more demand for memory generally now, so assuming it's not a demand bubble that pops rapidly, I'd expect the new normal to end up at a much higher baseline. 512GB would be 4x greater than today's max, so even with the relatively slow last 10 years development pace, give it five years max?
The new Macbook Neo is 8GB. I think that if we are lucky, the huge RAM demand right now means new factory buildouts which eventually means more supply and prices go back down, and capacity begins to go up. This level of demand was just not anticipated by anyone.