One thing missing from this discussion is the cost of DRAM. It hit $4/GB in 2011, and hasn’t changed all that much since then. In contrast if you go back anothe

One thing missing from this discussion is the cost of DRAM. It hit $4/GB in 2011, and hasn’t changed all that much since then. In contrast if you go back another 13 years, memory cost $1/MB in 1998. Laptops have adapted to constant-price DRAM - 8GB was a decent memory size 10 years ago, and 16 is probably the equivalent today, with lots of swapping to compressed RAM using CPU cycles that get cheaper every year, and some swapping to flash that is 10-20x faster than the hard drives of 10-25 years ago. Servers not so much for various reasons, not all rational. The lessons we learned in the decades when RAM was always getting bigger and cheaper every year don’t always apply nowadays.