3 ms·

We'll probably never actually know, all we can do is assume. The likelihood is that they wanted to offer a version with 16 GB for people who needed it, and the

We'll probably never actually know, all we can do is assume. The likelihood is that they wanted to offer a version with 16 GB for people who needed it, and they wanted to offer 1TB/2TB options for people who needed them, and instead of having potentially 10 different models (five storage capacities times two RAM capacities), they decided that they had to draw the line somewhere. Thus they probably looked at the storage options and thought "Which of these tiers of storage would appeal to the kind of user to whom 16 GB of RAM also appeals?" and decided based on that. Optionally/additionally, they may have looked at their whole M1 product line and tried to figure out which combination of capacities made the most sense across all products and users, so that they could create the fewest number of M1 variations and thus get the biggest economies of scale.

HiroProtagonist 6y ago
Thank you for your answer. I wonder, what are your assumptions regarding these two questions: 1) Will the 16GB RAM variants feel faster than the 8GB RAM models? Will there be a difference in 'day to day' operation, and will it just feel snappier? 2) What about a larger SSD necessitates double the RAM?
- schappim 6y ago
  1) They might not. Back in 2018 when they did a similar thing, the larger RAM variants were slightly slower. [1] 2) Not a direct answer, but from memory Apple caculated (in 2018) that moving up to the 1TB required an extra half gig of RAM over the 512GB version. The end qty of the RAM was a function of the size of RAM modules. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj1tAK_21zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj1tAK_21zc