Apple has confirmed that the entire iPhone 16 Lineup Sports 16GB of RAM, a nice change over previous models.

A big question with each generation of iPhone is how much RAM the new models have. In previous generations, there was sometimes a distinction between the base model and the Pro variant.

In the case of the iPhone 16, however, Apple felt the entire would benefit from 8GB of RAM, thanks largely to the inclusion of Apple Intelligence.

In an interview with Geekerwan, via 9to5Mac, Apple’s Johny Srouji outlined the company’s reasoning:

“Our goal is to build the best products, delivering the absolute best user experience. As it relates to Apple Intelligence, DRAM is one aspect. And when we look at what we’re building, whether it’s silicon, hardware, or software, we don’t want to be wasteful in many ways.

We have lots of data that tells us what is going to enable a certain feature, and Apple Intelligence is one of those very, very important features that we want to enable. And we look at different configurations, both for computation and memory bandwidth and memory capacity. And then we make the right trade-off and balance of what actually makes the most sense. So, Apple Intelligence was a major feature that led us to believe that we need to get to 8GB.

But having said that, the 8GB is going to help immensely among other applications, including gaming, high-end gaming, AAA-titled games, and high-end gaming on device. So, I think it’s going to be really, really beneficial.

The other thing to keep in mind, this is one of the benefits of having the software and the silicon and the product fully integrated, is that the software team, our excellent software team, will optimize not only for compute, they’ll also optimize for the memory footprint of each application. So, they don’t end up also wasting memory.

So, we look at all these trade-offs and we end up with, here’s what makes sense, and 8 gigabytes was the most perfect choice for us.”

Interestingly, while 8 GB is an all-time high for the iPhone, it’s still well behind what some flagship Android phones offer. For example, the new Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold comes with 16GB of RAM.