[eftychis]

I had the same question, but I can only speculate at the moment. The cynical part of me thinks in a similar line: create an artificial differentiation and push people to upgrade.

If anyone has any real clues that they can share pseudonymously, that would be great. Not sure which department drove that change.

[brailsafe]

They definitely do that. You could get 64gb ram without going up to the top spec of the Max tier of CPU in the M1 and M2 generations, but with the M4 Pro you can only do 24 or 48gb, while on the lower spec M4 Max you can only do 36gb and nothing else, only the absolute best CPU can do 64, therefore if you were otherwise going to get the 48gb m4 pro, you'd have to spend another ~$1200 USD to get another 16gb of ram if all you cared about was ram.

There may be a technical explanation for it, but incentives are incentives.

[matt-p]

you can get 64GB on the mini with M4-Pro so that lays credence to no technical reason, but at the same time if the business reason was strong, why allow it on the mini but not in a macbook? I think this is equally likely to be due to reducing SKUs or something. E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.

[brailsafe]

Ya, what you're talking about did spread a bit on the various forums when it became clear they were aggressively segmenting that market.

> E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.

It seems like the way they've divided them, there's at least one more SKU than there would otherwise be, because of that base M4 Max with only 36gb of ram (can't get it with 24,48,64,96), so if you want the extra few cores, you now have to go to the max Max to get any more ram.

It took me a while to commit to the purchase, because I felt like an idiot implicitly telling them I'm okay with that bs pricing ladder, but at least I didn't over extend and go for the Max. They already charge comically too much for ram and storage.