On Monday, Apple touted the new iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro as the first iPhones designed from the ground up for Apple Intelligence with the A18 and A18 Pro chips. In a new interview, Apple’s Johny Srouji revealed more details about the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence, including confirmation that all four iPhone 16 models will have 8GB of RAM.

Last year, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus had 6GB of RAM, while the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max had 8GB of RAM. This is presumably one reason why the iPhone 15 Pro phones can run Apple Intelligence and the other models cannot. This year, all four iPhone 16 models can run Apple Intelligence — in part because they all have 8GB of RAM.

Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, confirmed the 8GB RAM figure in an interview with Geekerwan. This is the first time Apple has publicly confirmed the amount of RAM in the iPhone 16. This is notably a departure from previous years, as Apple usually shies away from publicly revealing such specifications.

During the interview, Srouji explained that Apple Intelligence is one of the reasons for the RAM increase, but noted that other things will benefit as well:

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

We have a lot of data that tells us what a particular feature enables, and Apple Intelligence is one of those very, very important features that we want to enable. And we look at different configurations, both in terms of compute power, memory bandwidth and storage capacity. And then we make the right trade-off and the right balance to figure out what actually makes the most sense. So Apple Intelligence was a key feature that made us believe we need to get to 8GB.

But other than that, the 8GB is going to help tremendously with other applications including gaming, high-end gaming, AAA title gaming, high-end gaming on the device, so I think it’s going to be really, really useful.

Another benefit of the complete integration of software, chip and product is that the software team, our excellent software team, optimizes not only the computing power but also the memory requirements of each application. So in the end, no memory is wasted.

So we weighed all of these trade-offs and came to the conclusion that this made sense: 8 gigabytes was the optimal choice for us.”

When asked how Apple Silicon compares to the rest of the industry and why Apple is not focusing on increasing core counts like some of its competitors, Srouji explained:

“If you look at the single-threaded performance core across all of our silicon, it’s absolutely the best in the industry. We’re the industry leader. If you look at the efficiency cores, it’s the same thing, we’re absolutely the leader. We’re right up there with the front runners.

And then when we look at the configuration, whether it’s a silicon that goes into the iPhone, the iPad, or the Mac, we have a lot of simulation and performance modeling tools and we look at actual data. And then we consider things like the battery size of a product, the power system of a product, the thermal envelope of the product, because oversizing, as I said, is wasteful.

For example, with the phone, we came to the conclusion that two P4E, so two performance cores for efficiency cores, would meet the needs of this device because we have the absolute best single thread and the efficiency cores are so well suited to other tasks and that configuration works.”

The full interview is absolutely worth watching and can be found below. It’s one of the best – if not the best – interviews I’ve seen with Srouji. It’s fascinating to listen to Srouji talk about the technical details of Apple Silicon and learn more about all the decisions Apple makes during the new product and silicon development process.