Apple has two bins of M1 chips for their laptops, and users who spend extra on 1TB+ of storage are more likely to be working with applications that benefit from

Apple has two bins of M1 chips for their laptops, and users who spend extra on 1TB+ of storage are more likely to be working with applications that benefit from extra memory for caching and multitasking. Apple does not custom-to-order their iOS or iPadOS devices, and high-tier purchases will be less frequent than low-tier, so the binning ensures that high-tier users get extra RAM just in case they need it (a higher likelihood) without raising the price for low-tier users. No confirmation of any theory or explanation is likely to be proven by statements from Apple, who historically never discusses their hardware choice pricing tiers. In the past, with custom to order choices, the highest-end video cards were only available on the highest-tier models of a given computer. This sort of winnowing of choices has been consistent for many years and has little or no purely technical basis, as long as your definition of technical excludes business concerns like “production costs for binning variations” and “supply chain management” and “customer confusion” and “price point vs. expectation management” and so on.