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

Nicky G

macrumors 65816
Mar 24, 2002
1,104
1,199
Baltimore
I've said it before, and I say it again. The next big thing is the full OS X on ARM.

I would have doubted this even a year ago, but for MacBook Air and Mac mini, I think it could happen with A8. Wonder if they could manage a 20+ hour battery life MacBook Air Retina w/ A8, 12" screen, reeeaaally thin, maybe 8GB RAM, 256 and 512GB solid state storage options. That would be an exceptionally tempting machine!
 

EricTheHalfBee

Suspended
Mar 10, 2013
467
739
So much discussion over RAM. Who cares? It's just as stupid as taking Jobs quotes like stealing ideas, larger screen hummer phones or smaller iPads and twisting them around so you can prove a point. Waste of time.


The bottom line is the A7 is far more advanced than anything ARM, Samsung or Qualcomm have. By a mile.
 

Menneisyys2

macrumors 603
Jun 7, 2011
5,934
1,033
You claimed that "Fanboys" said that iDevices don't need 2 GB.

That guy is arguing that the trade-off isn't worth it. When it comes to price and battery life, "what's it cost in money and resources?" is a valid discussion.

Not even close to the being the same.

Again: most fanboys state Apple didn't add more RAM because:

1, either 1GB is enough (stated by many fanboys here at MR too)
2, or, adding another 1/2GB would have resulted in dramatically increased power usage etc.

The latter "argument" is easily nullified by the battery life of for example the 2GB Windows Phone-based Nokia 1020. (And I don't even list Android devices with 2/3 GB of RAM as I know the OS itself is pretty hard on the battery. Not so with WP; hence using the 1020 as a counter-example.)

----------

So much discussion over RAM. Who cares?

Well, users annoyed by the constant Safari tab reloading (which is an issue on iPads even under iOS7.1 - and I haven't even mentioned Sfari crashes under previous iOS versions!) and app reloading.

I, who play a lot on my rMini with XCOM and frequently minimize the game to fire up Safari / Mail / whatever, am seriously annoyed by the game's frequently being shut down by the OS and having to wait another half a minute for the game to reload. With 2 GB of RAM, shutting down minimized tasks wouldn't be this big an issue.
 

Sun Baked

macrumors G5
May 19, 2002
14,909
129
Wonder if they are simply thinking about reentering the market to compete against the Chromebooks that they left when the killed the eMate years ago.
 

milo

macrumors 604
Sep 23, 2003
6,891
522
What's "enough"?

I just said, many people insist that the 1 gig currently in iOS devices is enough. Or are you asking for a definition of the word? A dictionary would be able to help with that.

Who has said that iOS apps use no RAM?

All the fanboys who seem to think that iOS uses some sort of magical powers to do multitasking and ram handling.

So much discussion over RAM. Who cares?

People who have real world performance degradation due to the lack of ram.

just minimizing (and not manually killing) apps under iOS7 indeed doesn't result in stability problems.

I haven't had many stability problems but often have the issue of safari tabs reloading. And every time, manually quitting all the other apps makes that problem go away. If those background apps truly used no resources, they wouldn't make a difference to that particular issue. Maybe it does boil down to some apps handling their multitasking "wrong". But I see it constantly with a variety of different apps "open". Would more memory help that problem? Absolutely.
 

xmichaelp

macrumors 68000
Jul 10, 2012
1,815
626
Apple's engineers are obviously pretty proficient at making ARM processors.

Is it out of the realm of possibility for them to make non-intel x86 processors that wouldn't break compatibility with current apps? I honestly don't know.
 

Menneisyys2

macrumors 603
Jun 7, 2011
5,934
1,033
I haven't had many stability problems but often have the issue of safari tabs reloading. And every time, manually quitting all the other apps makes that problem go away. If those background apps truly used no resources, they wouldn't make a difference to that particular issue. Maybe it does boil down to some apps handling their multitasking "wrong". But I see it constantly with a variety of different apps "open". Would more memory help that problem? Absolutely.

OK, sorry, I should have stated I've only spoken of third-party apps and not Safari tabs. Safari is sometimes over-cautious WRT shutting down background tabs and always tries to keep at least 100 Mbytes of RAM free. It's the latter (Safari, unless you load a huge page taking 200-300 Mbytes of RAM - for example, nin.com on a Retina iPad) that doesn't trigger the memory cleanup process in iOS; this is why manual background app killing is advisable before using Safari.

However, this isn't an issue in third-party apps as I've explained above.
 

danielsutton

macrumors 6502
Jun 13, 2011
370
125
I've said it before, and I say it again. The next big thing is the full OS X on ARM.

I think you are right about OS X eventually (and perhaps sooner than we might think) running on ARM chips. I have been laughed at for suggesting the same on these boards, but I still firmly believe that a new class of high-powered (and low power consumption) ARM chips will run future generations of Macs and iOS devices.
 

dumastudetto

macrumors 601
Aug 28, 2013
4,425
6,073
Los Angeles, USA
Apple's iOS devices are the world's only truly desktop class mobile devices. Users of other devices can laugh at the specs, but the truth is nothing beats iPhone or iPad for performance, experience and the best developer ecosystem.
 

Abazigal

Contributor
Jul 18, 2011
17,558
18,128
Singapore
My first reaction after reading such articles is always "yeah, so?" Some predictions as to what Apple might plan to do with the a7 might be nice, are even the possibilities of such a powerful processor.

Else, what's the point of regurgitating the same information six months later? There is zero new information and practically no value add whatsoever.
 

AppleScruff1

macrumors G4
Feb 10, 2011
10,026
2,948
I haven't had many stability problems but often have the issue of safari tabs reloading. And every time, manually quitting all the other apps makes that problem go away. If those background apps truly used no resources, they wouldn't make a difference to that particular issue. Maybe it does boil down to some apps handling their multitasking "wrong". But I see it constantly with a variety of different apps "open". Would more memory help that problem? Absolutely.

I haven't had any stability problems since the 7.1 update, but I have the page reloading in Safari and Chrome if I have 3-5 tabs open and closing all other apps doesn't really help it. I can go back and forth for a couple of minutes, but if I stay reading on one site for over 5 minutes and change to a different tab, it reloads. This is on an iPad Air and it really is my only major complaint.
 

Small White Car

macrumors G4
Aug 29, 2006
10,959
1,420
Washington DC
Again: most fanboys state Apple didn't add more RAM because:

1, either 1GB is enough (stated by many fanboys here at MR too)

I must have missed all of those posts because I have only seen that opinion when it was followed by some sort of qualifier. I have never seen anyone state that "1 GB is enough" and just leave it at that.

And should there be one or two examples floating around I hardly think it's fair to say that "most fanboys state" when it's apparently an opinion that's so small it's gone completely un-noticed by me.
 

i4m

macrumors regular
Jun 12, 2013
197
0
Yet macrumors members still manage to cry about iOS 7's UI months after it launched in threads that have nothing to do with it. :rolleyes:

Ha! you think people forget about the crappiness of ios 7 just because time passes by? :rolleyes:
 

AppleScruff1

macrumors G4
Feb 10, 2011
10,026
2,948
Apple's iOS devices are the world's only truly desktop class mobile devices. Users of other devices can laugh at the specs, but the truth is nothing beats iPhone or iPad for performance, experience and the best developer ecosystem.

They are far from desktop class.
 

appledes7

macrumors 6502a
Jul 12, 2011
756
0
For example, http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3566541?page=3

(Make sure you're in "flat view"):

"No, the current iPad and iPhones have 1 gig because that's the current sweet spot of cost versus performance. More memory is not free. Doubling it to 2 gig won't make a huge difference, except in very specific situations."

And it's only one example. (I've had a lot of heated discussions with the guy that wrote this, "gaussian blur". I consider him a blind Apple fanboy. In many of his other posts he did state iDevices don't need more than 1GB of RAM.)

Still doesn't address the original quote:

there would be no point in having 2GB of RAM in any iDevice!

The original post said there would be no point. According to that post, doubling it would make a different in "specific situations", thus indicating that there is indeed a point to more RAM. No difference = no point to adding more RAM. Some level of difference = a point/reason to add more RAM. Its so simple.

Still waiting to see where someone said "there would be no point in having 2GB of RAM in any iDevice!" because at this point, it is looking like a made-up quote.
 

Baklava

macrumors 6502a
Feb 1, 2010
569
53
Germany
Is it possible to build computers with these ARM chips? In other words: could ARM replace Intel one day?
 

Menneisyys2

macrumors 603
Jun 7, 2011
5,934
1,033
The original post said there would be no point. According to that post, doubling it would make a different in "specific situations", thus indicating that there is indeed a point to more RAM. No difference = no point to adding more RAM. Some level of difference = a point/reason to add more RAM. Its so simple.

Still waiting to see where someone said "there would be no point in having 2GB of RAM in any iDevice!" because at this point, it is looking like a made-up quote.

OK, now I see what you mean.

Let me phrase my argument this way: "Apple fanboys tend to state Apple did the right and best thing when only delivering even the latest iDevices with 1GB of RAM".

Again, this argument is technically nonsense. Anyone knowing the battery life of competing 2GB RAM-equipped WP products (the Nokia 1020) know the additional power usage of having to constantly power on an additional 1GB of RAM is negligble and in no way result in vastly inferior battery life. (Again, I purposefully not list 2/3GB Android phones because their OS is far less battery-friendly than either iOS or WP and, consequently, don't represent a battery-wise ideal OS.)

And there isn't a space / volume constraint either - after all, for example the Nexus 7 2013, which has a considerably smaller volume than the Retina iPad Mini / Air, has managed to pack in 2GB of RAM. The volume argument ("2GB of RAM would take far more volume") is also very often cited by Apple fanboys - by the above-cited "gaussian blur" over at DPR as well.

All in all, this is why I consider the argument "1GB is the best compromise" fanboyish. Because it's simply not true, neither battery life- nor volume-wise.
 

SvP

macrumors 6502
Mar 31, 2009
464
122
Wait! I thought 1GB is more than sufficient and there would be no point in having 2GB of RAM in any iDevice! (At least Apple fanboys state this...)

The only thing the "fanboy" designation adds to the discussion is that it shows you're making emotional statements.

I think you're being trolled, and with succes. Have respect for your opponent, even in internet forum based discussions.
 

xmichaelp

macrumors 68000
Jul 10, 2012
1,815
626
Ha! you think people forget about the crappiness of ios 7 just because time passes by? :rolleyes:

Cool, you think iOS 6 looks better. Doesn't mean you have to bring it up all the time when it's irrelevant. It's far past the point of just being pathetic. That and telling Apple to bring back a 17 inch MBP in every MBA thread.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.