Hacker News Reader

It's purely about compute power[0]. The A17 Pro has 35 TOPS of Neural Engine performance, A16 Bionic has 17. A15 has 15.8.

The M-series have less performance, but I think they're compensated by being in iPads where they can use more power (battery) without impacting people's lives too much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17

View on HN

It’s about RAM, I think. Only A17 Pro has 8GB, which we can infer is the new baseline.

It's only 2GB more than the A16, and Apple's models are "SLM"s by their own terminology.

But it might be significant too. Still it's not an arbitrary limitation, but an actual lack of processing power on the older devices.

Yes, 25% more RAM is significant. As you said, the M1 has significantly less performance, but it has enough memory. We can infer that RAM is the deciding factor from that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com