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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

(deleted because of unintelligent reply)