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Apple Explains iPhone 15 Pro Requirement for Apple Intelligence
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Then that is the biggest "gate" by Tim, saving money by using virtual memory instead of real ram.
It would have made more sense to provide 8 GB since 13 or 14 and not only PRO, it is not that they did not know ...did they?
Either they did not anticipate it(because they totally underestimated AI, which is not unlikely being the last one coming to it) or this was plain and simple planned obsolescence. Pick the one you prefer, both are not nice
iOS has virtual memory, but it's not what you are thinking of. It just means the memory space is "virtual", ie, not mapped directly to physical memory. iOS presents a virtual memory space to apps so each 32 bit app can behave as if it has 4GB. Each MacOS 64 bit app can behave as if it has 2^64 bytes (a sh##ton) of memory. In reality, if an iPhone app actually tries to allocate that much memory, iOS would probably just tell it to get bent
When iOS is low on memory, it does not swap to storage. It tells the low priority apps I'm going to suspend you now so save whatever you need so when the user switches back you can pick up where you left off. It may leave the app paused (no CPU allocation), it may reclaim the memory allocated to the app, or it may terminate the app outright.
Windows 3 had a swap file and CPU as far back as i386 had support for virtual memory and memory paging. It would be surprising if the A chips don't, but then, that may be the case if the OS has no use for it. iPadOS got memory swapping in 2020, but the swap file is limited to like 1 or 2gb and I think it only swaps certain system processes, not user apps.
Yes. The M# iPads with 128GB or larger drives have swap memory.
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Alright so on M series chip, 8GB is still equivalent to 16GB of RAM in windows counterparts…
Wonder if Apple would allow M chips to run AI with only 4GB of physical RAM had they push that configuration as default.
Also interesting to know that iPadOS supports swap but not iOS.
Realistically it’s more like 12GB, but yeah. Also the A12-based developer Apple Silicon transition Macs had custom A12s which did support swap memory.
That “8GB=16GB” excuse existed ever since critics accuse Apple of price gouging RAM upgrades and storage upgrades after the transition to Apple silicon. And since then there has been no shortage of “most people only need 8GB of RAM for their daily tasks” claims and posts everywhere.
I thought Apple would be able to work out that limited 8GB of RAM so it functions like 16GB physical memory for AI purposes. And 6GB works as 12GB and so on, going as low as 4GB. (/sarcasm)
Highly unlikely you can opt out. My bet is you can choose to not use some of their generative features, but you will probably be using it one way or another in various minuscule ways.
When the M1 iPad was introduced in 2021, that’s when virtual memory in the form of storage swap was made possible and was introduced in iPadOS 16 for M-series iPads with at least 256GB of storage. That list included the 2021 iPad Pros and the iPad Air 5th Generation back then, to of course including any newer iPad Pro or Air. This also helped facilitate the creation of Stage Manager, though Apple did use some tricks to get around the lack of swap in the A12X and A12Z chips (2018 and 2020 iPad Pros). Initially Stage Manager could not be run on those iPads, but Apple figured out a way to get around it and managed to enable it for a single screen. Note A-series chips have never supported more than one screen while base M-series chips from M1-M4 support two displays.
8GB of RAM is still 8GB, but there are all sorts of tricks programmers can use to make RAM usage more efficient. If you remember the old days of MS-DOS, there was a product called RAM Doubler that used on-the-fly compression to make it seem like there was more RAM. Apple uses similar methods and more to optimize how much memory is actually used.
Not in the way most people think of virtual memory, which typically refers to swap files temporarily located on drives that serve as backup memory. All modern OS’es have virtual memory in the sense that the address in memory that a program thinks its memory allocation is located is not the actual location in RAM. Every byte in RAM is specified by a numerical address from 0 to the maximum RAM. Every program thinks it has the entire memory space allocated to it, but the OS fools it into thinking that. In reality, the 0 address space for an app is somewhere else in physical memory and the OS’s memory manager tracks where that real address is.
When people mostly talk of virtual memory, they are referring to physical disk space and a swap file where memory allocated can be removed from RAM and temporarily stored on disk where the OS can move memory pages in and out of physical RAM according to what is needed at any specific moment. While iPadOS with M-series SoC’s does have swap memory, iOS does not. In iOS, the memory manager will move RAM out of physical RAM by suspending that application so it’s no longer actually running and unsuspend the new active app. iPadOS does that to some extent as well, but allows up to four apps (eight with external display) to remain active at a time, using swap to facilitate having that many apps open at once.
There’s something to be said on that, so credit where credit is due.
But also there have been comments here of people going from 64GB and 128GB PCs “down” to MacBook Pros with 32GB because no matter what they upgraded on the Windows world for their use case it would always chug.
The reason being that yes, RAM is cheaper there but as the saying goes “there’s no free lunch” and there’s always a trade off. In the case of that ensemble of cheaper motherboard, ram channels, bit depths, etc… it would “always saturate” and underperform (or something along those lines, forgetting the technical terms).
The ideal being going the fast ram of the GPU world, but as we know, higher very fast GPU RAMs offers happens to get back into the very expensive realm.
There are plenty of users with older A-series chip iPads that have succesfully enabled Stage Manager and external display support. As far as I have read and seen the Stage Manager hack works on iPadOS 16-17.1.2. Here is a few models that has been metioned to work:
iPad Pro 2017 10.5 (A10X Fusion)
iPad 6th gen 2018 (A10 Fusion)
iPad Air 4 (A14 Bionic)
iPad mini6 2021 (A15 Bionic)
So, yes A-series chips have never officially supported more than one screen and Stage Manager, but it is still possible and usable.
The chips themselved were regular A12s, but I assume the ssd controller was different, and then there was OS difference, too.
I think that when the dust settles, you will see that Apple will end up being right where they need to be. As for where all the other AI companies end up, well, time will tell. Too many people tend to overestimate what can happen in the short run while severely underestimating what does actually wind up happening in the long term.
It cost Apple MORE to source smaller ram chips because there were fewer of them in circulation.
it’s wild to think about that. Apple had these modules made specifically for
at no point did I say we needed more than 16gb.
I’m saying 16gb should have been the minimum for a decade now.
Laptops shipping today with 8GB of ram are either $200 asus windows throw away machines OR $1200 beautiful engineered MacBooks……
Which is a joke.
"Older phones simply lack the hardware required to run the new killer features.
Hardware that we purposefully designed; while we already knew about these killer features in the pipeline. Like 8 gig of ram that we said ought to be enough for any use case (except these new killer features)"
As such you'll need to upgrade to the latest phones that have just enough resources to run our new killer feature (but not enough to run our next killer feature that we're already aware of)"
Hardware that we purposefully designed; while we already knew about these killer features in the pipeline. Like 8 gig of ram that we said ought to be enough for any use case (except these new killer features)"
As such you'll need to upgrade to the latest phones that have just enough resources to run our new killer feature (but not enough to run our next killer feature that we're already aware of)"
It’s all about Tim Cook and his greed.
But if Apple started to charge for better upgrades on older phones, so that we could run the new AI, wouldn’t it be a great solution. I would be ready to pay for it, instead of being forced to buy a phablet, I have 2 iPad mini’s and don’t need a big phone in a similar size
I want my iPhone MINI to run the latest 😡