While Apple rarely officially states the amount of RAM in its iPads, the company did give figures for the M4 iPad Pros: models with 256 GB or 512 GB of storage have a CPU with nine cores (3+6) and 8 GB of RAM, while the variants with 1 TB or 2 TB of storage have a ten-core CPU (4+6) and 16 GB of RAM. But early iPad teardowns show one thing: entry-level models appear to have 12GB of RAM.
The references of the two chips visible in the photos of the interior of the iPad Pros show that they have a capacity of 48 gigabits, or 6 gigabytes, as some have noticed on a forum. From a purely technical point of view, therefore, the iPads in question have a priori 12 GB of RAM, while models with 16 GB seem to only have 16 GB.
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The exact reasons for Apple’s choice are not known, and there are different explanations to justify (or not) the choice to restrict RAM. The first is simple: Apple wants to sell high-end iPad Pros. It’s a bit simplistic, but possible. Second, Apple may have chosen to limit RAM for technical reasons, and there are many of them. The additional memory can be dedicated to the NPU – even Google considers that 8 GB is not enough for AI -, to the SSD controller (512 GB of storage generally requires 512 MB of RAM to properly support NAND memory), etc. . This is a sometimes visible problem: some Macs equipped with a T2 chip have a component with less RAM, which limits updates. It is also perfectly possible that Apple limits memory to 8 GB for iPadOS applications while allowing certain tasks (related to AI) to benefit from it. Finally, the marking may simply be wrong on memory chips, although this is unlikely.
In any case, the possible presence of 12 GB of RAM also implies two things: the iPad Pros would have more RAM than the MacBook Air and Pro by default, and Apple could offer a new version with 24 GB of RAM, and for example 4 TB of storage.
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