4.2 memory

[saberahul]

running the battery tune application on my iPad tells me how much memory is being used. With running just the native apps in the background, I usually have 19 mb free. Ifi close them and have nothing in the background I have about 50 mb free. Anyone find this weird?

 

[ovrlrd]

Not really. The iPad only has 256mb of ram though so it might get pretty tough at times with the multitasking. I also predict memory usage will improve with each new beta that comes out. This is just the first version.

 

[saberahul]

Not really. The iPad only has 256mb of ram though so it might get pretty tough at times with the multitasking. I also predict memory usage will improve with each new beta that comes out. This is just the first version.

Ya I agree. I was surprised though and hope they make it better.

 

[blackNBUK]

I don't put too much weight on what memory reporting Apps say. I've tried a few of these Apps and none of them seem to work right. AFAIK OSX splits memory into four pools, Wired, Active, Inactive and Free. If you add these up you should get the total memory of the device. However both Pad Info and iMemGraph are currently reporting the grand total as being around 140Mbs instead of the 256Mbs that I would expect.

So the question is where has this 'missing' memory gone? Presumably iOS is using it for something. If it is being used for caching or buffering then it's likely that it could be very quickly freed up for App use.

Do jail broken iPads give more information?

 

[Graeme43]

I read that the A4 iPod touch has 256 as well as the iPad and only the iPhone 4 has 512 (maybe to help cell features).... sooo people should stop worrying about the RAM

 

[JulianL]

I read that the A4 iPod touch has 256 as well as the iPad and only the iPhone 4 has 512 (maybe to help cell features).... sooo people should stop worrying about the RAM

Yeah. I guess that Apple have the choice of two variants of the A4 at the moment, the one with 256MB as used in the current iPad and the one with 512MB as used in the iPhone 4. My impression is that Apple want to position the iPod Touch as a lower-end device vs. the iPhone (the pricing clearly supports this) so they chose the A4-256MB for the new Touch since they figured it was OK for that class of device and would have saved on component costs.

Given that Apple have now got considerable manufacturing and field experience of shipping the A4-512MB, there's no way that the next iPad will have less than 512MB of RAM integrated into the CPU package for the next device.

- Julian