Ask HN: Why do iPad Pros with 1TB SSD and up have double the RAM | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do iPad Pros with 1TB SSD and up have double the RAM

The new iPad Pros come with 8GB RAM on models with 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB storage but 16GB RAM on models with 1TB or 2TB storage.

Why is this the case? Will it make a difference in how 'snappy' the iPad feels? I almost feel like I have to get at least the 1TB model so I get the 16GB of RAM. Please disabuse me of this notion if I'm wrong, and thanks in advance for the technical explanation of why this is the case.

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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.

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?

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

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.

It's worth noting that the 3rd gen 12.9 inch and 1st gen 11 inch iPad pros also had more RAM on the 1TB models (6gb vs 4gb on the models with less storage).

The next gen (which was the current gen until this announcement) did away with that and gave them all 6GB.

The main activities that apple seems to think people people use high-storage iPads for are editing high definition videos and pictures, so I assume the extra ram helps when you are dealing with the massive file sizes involved.

Until today the best ipad you could buy had 6GB of ram and was blazingly fast, so 8GB is absolutely not going to be a bottleneck except for very niche use cases.

With the M1, they're likely converging on ipad/ Mac shared apps in both directions.

I am sure this is done mostly for business reasons. Apple wants to minimize the SKUs in order to reduce production costs and inventory. On the other hand, they want to have a good price range to capture price conscious consumers and extract premiums over power users and people that want to have the best stuff.

So they have decided that if someone is willing to pay for more ram they should be willing to pay for more storage as well. Also, perhaps apps that use a lot of ram also use a lot of storage (the only ones I can think of are image/video editing software).

You should look at the software that you want to run and see if any of it needs a lot of memory/storage. I doubt you will need 16 GB ram for general webbrowsing/messaging.

> I am sure this is done mostly for business reasons.

I don't think this is the reason because Apple historically didn't use the amount of RAM in iPads as a differentiator[1].

Also, this is not new (Apple was doing this all the way back in 2018). From memory this was to do w/ the 1TB SSDs needing more addressable RAM for the larger file system.

Edit: Added evidence [1] as I'm getting downvoted for the view that "Apple historically didn't use the amount of RAM in iPads as a differentiator". As you'll see from the link, Apple has historically used screen size and storage to segment iPads.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181030153009/https://www.apple...

They may be changing tune since they’re continuing the trumpet the iPad as a desktop alternative. Now iPads have the M1 just like the Macs, so it’s an easier transition to talk about RAM

I must be on a different AB test, but Apple really isn't pushing the memory/RAM (even today) in their compare tool [1] or iPad product pages.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, it is just a strategy Apple has taken.

My guess is that the bulk of the target market doesn't know the difference between RAM and storage, and Apple marketing wants to keep things simple.

My company sells Raspberry Pis in Australia, and I can attest that I also encounter folks confused by the difference between RAM and storage. I think it is fair to say you'd expect the Raspberry Pi target market to be more savvy. I can only imagine what Apple deals with!

[1] https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/

One possibility is that the yield of M1 chips w/ 8GB is low or in short supply. They could be simply using the higher capacity modules as stop-gap.

My reasons for thinking this is:

1) In the embedded electronics market (day job), we've seen a heap of components and silicon become unavailable, or have very long (think a year) lead times. We've been told by our suppliers that the bottleneck is at the fab.

2) Apple is not actively using RAM to segment the iPad line (or at least doing a poor job of it.

3) The last time they bumped the RAM, it was going from 512GB to 1TB, with the difference requiring an extra half gig of RAM.

One thing that Apple is quite good at is creating premium tiers for their products aimed at different levels of consumer. Do you need that much storage if you have a cheap iCloud subscription and do you need that much RAM if you're watching YouTube and browsing social media? Probably not. Apple is good at FOMO, "What if I do need that much ram and storage?" but also at appeasing to professionals (evident by those high spec'd and expensive Mac's).

Maybe the assumption is those who need that much physical storage are working with audio, video and large image/3D files who might need extra ram to open them up and work with them (animators, content creators, musicians). Higher tiers are usually seen as more future proof and aimed towards professionals who might need the bumped up hardware, the average consumer not so much. If you are working with large files, you need a decent amount of memory, especially with video where even the highest tier being offered might not be enough.

You won't see a performance bump with the larger storage or memory though, it all comes down to mostly CPU and graphical processing ability, but the average user once again rarely ever hits the limits of modern powerful hardware like this.

I think the really interesting question here is why does an iPad Pro have 16 GB of RAM at all?

The previous generation of iPad Pros maxed out at 6 GB, so this is quite a jump.

Adding Thunderbolt support is also a bit of a mystery.

I suspect this will all become clear at WWDC in June when Apple announces iPadOS 15.

Because the M1 chip has two RAM options in laptops today: 8GB and 16GB. There’s two chip spots on the processor and either one spot is filled or both are. Apple is just putting those same two options into the iPad Pro, and since they have a high-end SKU at 16GB, may as well include it in the high-end SKUs at 1/2TB.

High speed external storage & full XDR monitor support is a godsend for people like me who use their iPads to do all their photography work.

What is your workflow? Do you do your culling -> light edit -> retouch in different apps?

I used to do culling in photo mechanic, then light edits in Lightroom, and heavier in photoshop. I almost exclusively use Lightroom on iPad for 95% of everything now. Not a pro, just an enthusiast - and don't take nearly as many photos now due to covid.

Apple’s brand lets them command a higher price per performance ratio. You’re seeing one of the mechanisms of that pricing power.

Your thought, “I almost feel like I have to get at least the 1TB model so I get the 16GB of RAM” is why their models are structured as they are.

That bit makes sense, I just wonder if this is something that would affect the actual usage experience of the device.

Will the 16GB RAM variants feel faster than the 8GB RAM models?

Depends on workload.

I have found that my workloads are more accelerated by processing core count, but I build multi-service cloud applications and want to run them locally.

If, for example, you run a bunch of Electron apps (Slack, VS Code, etc) and have hundreds of tabs open (I do too) then more RAM helps.

Those SSD sizes are more than anyone probably needs unless you’re doing something like high end video editing or pushing huge amounts of data.

What apps can even use 16GB of RAM or 1TB of disk space? It isn't like you can run Blender or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro on these devices?

There is some variant of iPhotoshop and LumaFusion does video editing. I can imagine 16GB + 1TB being useful for editing RED RAW footage soon enough.

There are some video editing apps that run on iPads. That's the only thing that really comes to mind.

iPad photoshop is real honest to goodness photoshop

(deleted because of unintelligent reply)

Nope. You can address 2TB devices without an extra 8GB of RAM, on macOS, and on iPadOS via USB-C.

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