I wonder if Apple's strategy is to push macOS developers to optimize for certain SOC cadences, rather than having to traditionally target every system configuration possible. Therefore they opted to only have limited SKUs of the M1: only differentiated by RAM and GPU cores.
Analogy is gaming consoles - the hardware is fixed for X years so game developers know exactly what to target and make better looking & performing games over the cycle of that console. Compared to, say, Windows 10 that has to run on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations.
This is actually similar to their approach to iOS and iPhones - iOS versions span across multiple iPhone cycles, but they are limits. For example, iOS 13 was supported on iPhones 6S thru iPhone 11, or the A9 thru the A13 SOCs. There's probably some correlation between good performance and the tight SOC-to-OS coupling.
We'll likely see similar, limited configurations for future Apple M* SOCs.
Analogy is gaming consoles - the hardware is fixed for X years so game developers know exactly what to target and make better looking & performing games over the cycle of that console. Compared to, say, Windows 10 that has to run on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations.
This is actually similar to their approach to iOS and iPhones - iOS versions span across multiple iPhone cycles, but they are limits. For example, iOS 13 was supported on iPhones 6S thru iPhone 11, or the A9 thru the A13 SOCs. There's probably some correlation between good performance and the tight SOC-to-OS coupling.
We'll likely see similar, limited configurations for future Apple M* SOCs.