I thought this was just an Apple thing. Whenever I log into my Apple account, at least one other device will make me log in again. I used to assume it was because I pretty much only use macOS (no iDevice in a long time) and maybe I was too infrequent.

The my inlaws got iPhones and they have to verify their Apple account and login again a few times a month. They don’t buy anything with them, so it’s nothing to do with financial security.

I talked to a couple of people after that who said they all do that on their Apple devices and just never really thought about it. They didn’t realize the other platforms don’t make you do that.

Call it a security feature. 🤷

You remember incorrectly. The M1 review units were all 16GB. Apple has kept the real world benchmarks of their base models obfuscated for years. It’s as simple as this. Sonoma and a tab of Safari consume upward of 7GB of RAM. That means under light use, 8GB models will have to swap constantly, slowing them down, heating them up, and wearing the SSD out exponentially faster. All of that goes away on 16GB.

This is also why Windows 11 is more performant on 8gb Intel models, but not necessarily 16gb.