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iPad 2 to Match iPhone 4's 512 MB of RAM?

axual said:
The amount of RAM is not important. If you can prove it is important, then please tell all. But I suspect you can not.
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I'm all for people who don't know anything about computers to buy and use them, but do you really have to participate in technical discussions about them?

For the rest of us: if iPad has only 256 megs of ram it couldn't possibly work as advertised (and shown so far). Therefore, it simply must have at least 512. I doubt it has more though, because Jobs would almost certainly bring it up as a bragging point. So, safe bet is 512.

Now, once you have that bare minimum of specs there, I don't think that just adding more serves much purpose. Engineers among us know that you have to pick 2 out of these 3: number of features, quality of build, and speed of delivery to market. Apple has done very well in the last two of those, while the competition has done well in only one (the number of features). That my friends is why Apple is winning this game right now.
 
CIA said:
I keep running out of RAM on my iPad1. I wish the iPad2 had 2GB of ram... I mean when I'm rendering in MAYA while processing a movie in Final Cut, while doing some fractal work in Mathmatica, I mean the iPad just slows to a halt....

/s



It's a iPad. I check mail, surf the web, and play basic apps. Who cares how much memory it has as long as it works?
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I totally agree. What heavy lifting are people actually doing on their iPad that requires this infinite amount of ram? The experience is most important.

However, if you open enough apps without closing out of them completely, it slows down and it is quite noticeable. I understand that I have to go through there and close apps, but most people probably go and reset their iPad because they think it's a crash.

If it had a bit more ram, these problems wouldn't occur as frequently.

Plus, if you add more ram to the devices, it gives the developers a bit more to play with and you can create apps that can do a lot more.

So I guess I would only ask why they wouldn't include more ram when you are talking about pennies per unit to upgrade when buying in those quantities. It really just ensures us that we will be upgrading soon, which is good for Apple and Apple stock holders, but not cool for consumers.
 
digdug6969 said:
Apple sometimes hides the specs they aren't proud of. I'm guessing 256MB.

Just like how they emphasized the cameras on the latest iPod Touch but they don't put up the fact that the camera is a terrible 0.7M pixel.

But they do show that the iPhone has a 5M pixel camera.

Since they're not listing the amount of RAM in the Tech Specs, I guessing it will be disappointing.
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It makes no sense to put in a duo-core processor and keep the RAM the same. I'm sure they bumped it up to 512MB, same as the iPhone 4.

Do you really think the iPad 2 would be as zippy as people have said, if it's still using 256MB of RAM?
 
Full of Win said:
SHAMEFUL it is not 1GB

Is Apple wanting Android Tablets to roll over them? In 1 year, 1GB and 2GB will be STANDARD. :mad:
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Wow, you have to be the most consistently annoying poster on macrumors. iOS devices don't NEED tons of RAM the way Android does. Why would Apple go through all the trouble of increasing the RAM when there is not going to be any measurable benefit to users? Plus, it increases costs and ENCOURAGES developers to write sloppy, inefficient code.

But please, continue spouting junk at the top of your lungs... It just helps people realize that you're either a troll or ignorant.
 
For those whom are defending the fact that RAM doesn't matter...

How does it make sense that an iPad that is supposed to do more than an iPhone have the same RAM?

512 MB is quite a bit of RAM, but it's saddening to see that a device that is supposed to completely replace computers have the exact RAM as a phone.
 
HiRez said:
One thing people need to understand is that there is some amount, potentially a significant amount, of RAM that is always or often used for "overhead": system usage. What that means is that doubling the amount of RAM in the device may actually give you more than double the amount of RAM usable for apps or cached web pages.

For example, let's say 100 MB is overhead (I do not know this is accurate but several years ago I remember reading reports the iOS system was using between 80-100 MB on iPhone, and it's almost certainly more now with major OS updates since then). On a 256 MB device (i.e. iPad1), that would leave 156 MB available. But on a 512 MB device with double the RAM, that would leave 412 MB available, or about 2.64 times as much. If the overhead happens to be more, the difference could be even more striking.

Just saying it might not be as bad as you think.
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Yup, very true.

We also should bear in mind the iOS has manual memory management which means memory is freed up much quicker than an OS with garbage collection; plus no Java VM which would otherwise likely use up quite a bit.
 
Benjamins said:
So I see 256MB ram is not "Too little RAM" then.
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Depends on what you do... But based on iOS 4.3 numbers, 256 MB leaves only about 68-93 MB available for apps, so it definitely limits the size of the documents you can work with and how many complex Safari pages you can have open, while listening to music, etc.

As a general rule, I think it's a bad thing if the underlying OS overhead takes more memory than is left available for apps. With iOS 4.3 overhead at between 163 - 188 MB, the numbers are on the users side if the device has 512 MB. At only 256 MB, the OS is taking most of it.
 
The Motorola XOOM has 1GB of RAM! It must be WAY better! That's double RAM! Let's all run out and buy a XOOM!

*crickets*

Seriously, this bizarre obsession with spec sheets is what PC companies and the Fandroid army simply don't understand about the general consumer.
 
donlphi said:
If it had a bit more ram, these problems wouldn't occur as frequently.

Plus, if you add more ram to the devices, it gives the developers a bit more to play with and you can create apps that can do a lot more.
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You couldn't be more wrong. What it does is allow coders to be lazy and not build the most efficient programs they can. This is no more evident than in the audio recording world. Great digitally recorded albums have been made with computers that would be considered neolithic by todays standards. It's all about trying to do more with less and squeezing every single byte of power.
 
Steve Jobs said it best in one of his interviews. (on the iPad) Here's the gist of it: Time will take care of these things. The technology will catch up.
 
goobot said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Apple said how much ram was in the 3GS and 4. Why? Because it was more.
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Apple never said how much RAM was in either phone. People like iFixIt tore it down and reported it.
 
People, what's wrong with you?

I think it is almost as true as the fact we all need oxygen to survive that it's not how much (long-many-big-etc) of something (in this case RAM) you have that makes the difference.

The only real thing that matters is how you use it. That's the only true.

It explains why my 2007 macbook with 2gb ram works better than my brother's fujitsu laptop with 4gb.


People. Look to the whole picture. Instead of limiting yourself to only a small decontextualized part.
 
The mass does not care much about RAM size let alone the ram bus which is also key for overall performance.

You'll rarely hear "I want 1GB XDR RAM!"

What matters is that the iPad has LPDDR2. :)
 
This may be a bit naive, but it seems that Apple has really gone quite far writing iOS to maximize the hardware they select for efficiency of performance.

Instead of relying on brute numbers to force a less-efficient operating system through the hoops, I think they've rightly gone along their well-established path of letting the user experience define their products. The market at this point certainly says so. Isn't this what Apple has always been about??

Of course, they charge a premium for that :rolleyes: but isn't that also what Apple has always been about? As an investor or end-product user you've got to love their model. They've implemented a strongly winning formula of making the user experience everything, often keeping spec discussions secondary. Mr. Jobs says as much - regularly.

So why all the up-in-arms hooey? It isn't the lack of RAM in any given device that's gonna do Apple in; if anything, it's their hubris :D
 
Full of Win said:
SHAMEFUL it is not 1GB

Is Apple wanting Android Tablets to roll over them? In 1 year, 1GB and 2GB will be STANDARD. :mad:
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Nonsense. These aren't Windows desktops young man. Only seriously media-rich apps like iMovie will even put a dent in 512MB. If any bog standard app starts eating memory in a major capacity on an iPad the developer should throw himself off a tall building. Developers have become lazy with the abundance of RAM available these days; it's typical for desktop apps to use many times the amount they actually need purely out of laziness.
 
For all the folks that exclaim the iPad 2 is fast enough and the 256MB of memory is enough, you're wrong. I have plenty of apps (1 cost me $20) on the iPad 1 that crash often due to low memory. And that's even with nothing else running.

Regardless of what you think, 256MB of memory is just not enough these days...and yes, I and others know that it is not a full fledged computer running a heavier OS with heavier apps.

Memory is simply there to store data while applications make decisions and/or store temporary information. The iPad 2.0 should have been boosted to at least 512MB to address the current apps that crash as well as to LOOK AHEAD for future apps that want to do more than sling birds at walls. Apps like Djay or business class apps that may want to crunch some numbers are going to need more than 256MB of memory.

I'm also sure that future versions of the iOS will be heavier and thus require more memory.

We all know that you can't compare an entire product on it's bare specs...but in this case, the memory spec is a sore problem for Apple...and they purposely avoided mentioning it and are retracking any statements. Apple knows developers and techies will be ticked to find out the Rev 2 couldn't come with more memory (that probably would have cost Apple $15).

There are lots of reports that this iPad 2.0 was really just a rush-out-the-door release to keep folks interested in the iPad until a REAL update comes along with iPad 3.0. That would certainly help explain why the memory was not boosted.

Remember, 256MB is the TOTAL ram in the system...iOS is eating its share...so what's left to the apps? 200MB? 128MB? 64MB?
 
chrmjenkins said:
512MB is the likely number. I challenge anyone who claims 1GB is necessary to provide an actual usage scenario where it would be necessary. Everyone saw the hands-on demo, the effects in photobooth were flying. The machine was incredibly responsive.
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I don't care how well the thing works or what the user experience is like. I want specs, dammit!
 
Salacion said:
There is no need to quote the article. We know what you're talking about when you post in the comments section of the article.
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I quoted the part of the article that I took exception to. I didn't quote the whole article because I didn't really have anything to add to the rest of it.
 
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