Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Official iPhone 6 Plus Reviews Report 1 GB RAM

MacRumors

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
63,556
30,884



Earlier today, a screenshot from iPhone monitoring app System Status suggested Apple's larger iPhone 6 Plus might be limited to 1 GB of RAM, much like the iPhone 6.

Several iPhone 6 Plus reviews, which were released this evening, appear to confirm that hypothesis, with multiple sites reporting the device has 1 GB of RAM. In its review, Macworld says that the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus both "appear to have the same 1GB of memory as last year's devices."

iphone6plus.jpg

TechRadar has a similar claim, stating that both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus have 1 GB of RAM, as does The Guardian, listing 1GB of RAM in the specifications of the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus. T3, TechRadar's sister site, said the iPhone 6 Plus's 1 GB of RAM seemed to handle all tasks thrown at it fairly well.
The 1GB of RAM inside, again, doesn't sound too beefy, but seemed to handle the new multi-tasking features well and propped up some simultaneous emailing, video watching and HD gaming. Internal tweaks such as the Metal graphics upgrade we must wait to see the benefit of, but the new BioShock port is one of the most demanding games on iOS currently and it performed great, as did The Wolf Among Us (check out that colour spectrum) and Asphalt 8 (speeeeeeed).
Click to expand...
Aside from the size difference between the 4.7 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 devices, the appearance of 1GB of RAM in both phones suggests that they have nearly identical internal specifications, offering the same A8 chip and memory. The larger iPhone 6 Plus does, however, have a larger battery due to its size and it also offers optical image stabilization as a differentiating factor.

Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will be arriving in stores and in the hands of customers beginning on Friday, September 19. We've rounded up a full list of all the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus reviews that have been released so far, giving users a clear picture of the two devices ahead of launch.

Article Link: Official iPhone 6 Plus Reviews Report 1 GB RAM
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/16/iphone-6-plus-reviews-1-gb-ram/
F

farewelwilliams

Suspended
Jun 18, 2014
4,966
18,041
well...how else is Apple going to sell the 6S?

and how else are they going to deprecate iPhone 6 when ios 12 comes out?
 
Last edited:
BulletToothTony

BulletToothTony

macrumors 6502
Jan 5, 2009
402
16
Seemed to handle? or Handled.... that's quite an important description they didn't care to dig too much into?

I gotta say thou, Apple has never made my new devices / computers feel sluggish... EVER.
 
Dulcimer

Dulcimer

macrumors 6502a
Nov 20, 2012
895
718
It's adequate for now, but it'll suck in a year when they optimize their latest OS for the new 2 GB versions of their devices. So where does that leave the 6 and 6 Plus? On par with the iPhone 5—a phone that was released in 2012. In fact, they'll be worse off with the higher resolutions and 64-bit architecture.

Bravo, Apple.
 
J

johncocktosen

macrumors newbie
Jul 14, 2008
16
0
Brooklyn
yeah well welcome to the new reality. dram prices are not going down thanks to capacity rationalization. we have phone launches such as this actually creating price increases in the market. that makes Micron stock a good buy, but the days of massive ram increases for the consumer (without a price increase) are on hold for now.
 
D

DTphonehome

macrumors 68000
Apr 4, 2003
1,914
3,377
NYC
Eh, who cares, as long as it works well. Still, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't just preempt the complainers and add an extra GB of RAM. It really can't cost them too much. Couple bucks at most.
 
Abazigal

Abazigal

Contributor
Jul 18, 2011
19,586
22,044
Singapore
How do you handle simultaneous email, video watching and gaming? There's no split-screen feature in iOS; this may simply mean that iOS has very efficient task switching, but otherwise, you are still limited to using one app at a time.

What I am interested in is how aggressively iOS will force apps to close when they are in the background. For example, on my iPhone 5s, I can have cnet comments loaded in Safari, lock my phone, then unlock it later only to find the entire website has reloaded.

I am thinking the iPhone 6s will have 1gb of ram as well. What does this mean for the iPad air 2? Will it still come with 1gb of ram? Apple seems to be very comfortable with this arrangement.
 
S

smxcan

macrumors newbie
Sep 9, 2014
3
0
Apple mentions the tiniest of hardware improvement when they advertise for their devices. They talk about it being 1mm thinner, 1g lighter, CPU performance xx% faster, so if the RAM was actually 100% more in the 6 plus, don't you think they'd think of mentioning it?! Why would they hide a spec that would increase sales? 1GB was obvious.
 
Last edited:
K

KALLT

macrumors 603
Sep 23, 2008
5,361
3,378
Apple’s insistence on 1 GB of RAM was already difficult to understand (or accept) when they so proudly introduced the 64-bit processor and its support in iOS 7 last year. Another year has passed and Apple releases two heavyweights with the same bottleneck. What’s the point of going for 64 bit if Apple doesn’t even nudge one bit into making use of the processor’s potential.

For me the bigger disappointment of this is the realisation that Apple clearly has no immediate plans to bring a more sophisticated form of multitasking to their devices. It will be the same old one app-at-a-time model and static images in the app switcher. I’m sure the battery concerns are not even that much of a problem anymore.
 
accentaudio

accentaudio

macrumors 6502
Apr 4, 2012
359
110
Kansas City
KylePowers said:
Profit margins. That is all.
Click to expand...

Can it seriously be saving them that much money? Do they not care at all what their customers are screaming for? Man, I sure wish I wasn't such an Apple fan, and have such an Apple ecosystem, or I would strongly consider jumping ship. Unless there is something I am missing, Apple as a whole sure seem to have their heads buried in their own asses, not their customers (where it should be).
 
S

Screwtape

macrumors regular
May 10, 2009
153
0
accentaudio said:
My question is this: Why is Apple so reluctant to put 2GB of RAM in these phones? Can anyone answer this?
Click to expand...

The additional power consumption and cost is probably the biggest, but there's a couple other possibilities:

For one, we don't know the exact speed at which the iPhone's NAND flash reads/writes, but it could be fast enough that there isn't a ton of overhead going to the disk.

Another possibility is that it's currently not possible to fit the extra RAM on the board and still maintain everything else that's crammed into the phone.

Finally, it's possible that 2GB of RAM doesn't produce the performance gains that everyone thinks it does. Therefore it isn't worth putting in due to other tradeoffs.
 
K

KALLT

macrumors 603
Sep 23, 2008
5,361
3,378
accentaudio said:
Can it seriously be saving them that much money? Do they not care at all what their customers are screaming for? Man, I sure wish I wasn't such an Apple fan, and have such an Apple ecosystem, or I would strongly consider jumping ship. Unless there is something I am missing, Apple as a whole sure seem to have their heads buried in their own asses, not their customers (where it should be).
Click to expand...

I think Apple has internalised the assumption that most of their customers just don’t care. Even on these forums people are sympathetic to the idea that more RAM isn’t necessary and won’t lead to a better experience on a daily basis. 1 GB of RAM is still ‘good enough’, no thought is given to the future when Apple does have an insight into making good use of iOS’s 64-bit support.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom