Apple’s Studio Display has 64GB of storage in addition to its iPhone 11-caliber processor

Apple’s new studio display is a fascinating technology, mainly due to the A13 Bionic chipset that powers it, making it as powerful as an entire iPhone 11. But it turns out the internal hardware of the Studio Display is even odder: not only does the Studio Display have an A13 chipset, but it also comes with a whopping 64GB of internal memory.
The Studio Display having some storage is logical, given the extra software that Apple is running on it to enable additional camera and audio features for things like portrait mode and spatial audio effects. But it’s surprising to see how much hardware the new monitor has.
For those keeping track at home, the 64GB of storage and A13 chip means that the Studio Display has a faster processor and twice the storage as the base model of the Apple TV 4K. It’s just a few sticks of RAM and a Wi-Fi radio away from being a full-fledged Apple Silicon iMac (or a giant 27-inch iPad that doesn’t have a touchscreen).

There’s a possible explanation for this: the Studio Display has an A13 chip, the same as the one that Apple used on the iPhone 11. The base configuration of an iPhone 11 was 64GB, meaning that Apple may be just recycling old parts from the iPhone 11 (complete with its existing soldered-on storage) and chucking them into a display.

Does the Studio Display need 64GB of storage? Not. But it’s possible that it was cheaper for Apple to repurpose one of its most widely produced chipset SKUs for the A13 rather than design a brand-new model with less storage specifically for the Studio Display.

And who knows? Maybe Apple (or an enterprising iOS jailbreaker) will figure out how to harness Studio Display’s hardware for some iOS, macOS, or tvOS experience.