It hasn’t felt t like there’s been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last… decade?

In memory? There’s been a ton of improvement, even if most of the coolest stuff isn’t making it into DIMMs that are installed in user laptops/desktops.

Advanced packaging technology has allowed chip manufacturers to put different silicon dies together with increasingly high performance (high bandwidth, low latency) connections in the same package, including with some three dimensional stacking. That way they can mix and match different silicon dies for greater cost effectiveness, yield, performance, etc.

This also means that in-package memory is now the standard in certain chips. Apple’s M-series silicon has its memory packaged right into the CPU/GPU package, as a system-in-a-package, so that the connection between the logic and memory is comparatively much higher performance, several times higher bandwidth than desktops or laptops that don’t follow that kind of architecture.

Similarly, in data centers, the AI boom has caused all the memory manufacturers to switch their production lines to high bandwidth memory, where they vertically stack a bunch of DRAM chips on each other, with ultra-fast, high bandwidth connections, so that they can shove terabytes of memory into these data center servers. These recent generations have been improving speed and bandwidth in ways that make consumer level DDR5 RAM look like child’s play.

So they’re improving things. Just not in ways that really show up in DIMM sticks.

Not strictly, there are usualy hurdles to overcome for home usage of datacentre tech, but it’s possible.

The hurdles are basically insurmountable with the hardware released after 2024.

The NVL72 for the Blackwell generation cost about $3 million and takes up a single server rack. The power consumption is about 130 kW, and most configurations require dedicated plumbing for the liquid cooling.

To put things in perspective, a residential electrical hookup is usually 50A or 100A for a house, with recommendations that anyone who is going to be charging electric cars should have 100A service. 100A at 240V is 24 kW.

So one server rack uses as much power as the maximum electrical capacity of 5 homes. You’ll never be able to pull that off in an actual residential environment.

Oh, and the newest 2026 generation, the Rubin NVL72s, use something like 230 kW of electrical power, almost twice as much as the previous 2024 generation.

There’s always going to be a robust used market for phones that were purchased outright, to be resold on a different cycle than every 2 years (plenty of rich people changing phones every year, and plenty of people replacing on a 3, 4, 5, or 6 year cycle). You can expect the market to basically settle on a curve where it depreciates along a predictable rate.

Leases don’t really change that, any more than leases changed the market for used cars, or even certified pre-owned by the same dealers and organized by the same manufacturers who sell new cars.

There will be times that the predefined lease terms will unexpectedly prove to be either beneficial or detrimental to the consumer. Sometimes external factors will affect the entire used market, like currency issues, or component pricing issues (imagine if RAM prices dramatically swing again for new devices in a way that affects the value of the already-sold devices out in the world), where the predefined lease prices turn into a windfall for someone. Like in 2021 or so when expiring car leases allows the lessee to buy out the car at the end of the lease for much cheaper than the car itself was worth.

It’s generally going to be a less than ideal financial decision to lease, but it also won’t collapse the used device market and it won’t be that far off the practice of selling your old phone when you buy a new one.