All iPads iPad Air RAM question

[Dmunjal]

So double the bits, double the ram? Wow.

Much higher resolution on the Retina iPads, too.

 

[richardbb85]

Got me stuffed how an iPhone 4S with 512MB ram runs fine if RAM is the issue on the 1GB Air...

i'd take 4s with 512mb over air anyday

 

[s2mikey]

Because games control how much RAM they use at any given time. They design the games with a memory limit for texture and models. Safari can't just decide to down scale images, nor does it have any clue about how much data the site it currently loads contains. Holding images for instant viewing consumes A-LOT of memory. A simple 720p screenshot is almost 3MB after decompression (it needs to be decompressed to be viewed). Now imagine viewing a page with several images on it.

That's sound logic but no game I've played on my air has ever looked or behaved anything other than super fast and beautiful graphically. Frame rates are excellent, motion is fluid, and everything is just top notch. I get that web browsers might have some sudden memory intensive tasks that they may not be ready for or whatever.

Still, better memory management does sound like what's needed here. More RAM would help but is NOT the real fix so to speak. My Air has run like a champ since day one. I got lucky I suppose.

 

[Sym0]

i'd take 4s with 512mb over air anyday

Umm, no. I have 4s and air and the A7 slaughters the 4s.

 

[MindsEye]

Switch off JavaScript from the settings, and "restart" Safari. With JavaScript disabled I can easily keep half a dozen tabs open without any reloading. The difference is just huge.

Of course, with JavaScript disabled most of web is more or less unusable, but this suggests that this is largely a software issue, somehow related to the JavaScript engine used by Safari. Hopefully it can be optimised.

I posted this same observation to another thread yesterday, but I am afraid to switch to another tab to get the link, since this page will then probably reload and I will lose everything I have written :-(

Too frustrated to copy this first - I should not have to do that on a tablet which cost me over 600€.

I think Tim Cook mocked the Android tablet experience few days ago? I am pretty sure the browsing experience is not worse on the new high end Android tablets with 2-3 GB RAM than it is on Air.

It can't be, because this is just poor.

My sentiments exactly which is why i got rid of my Air. I honestly partly blame myself though for ignoring this glaring deficiency. I knew when buying the Air it was a purchase for the longterm yet the installed RAM was a contradiction to this train of thought. As regardless of whether OS's are becoming more efficient in how they are coded to use available recourses, Web browsing still tends to be huge memory hog when working with multiple tabs irrespective of platform or browser.

Still i could never have imagined that from week one, with just roughly 4 tabs open and nothing else running in the background i would be getting constant page reloads and often app crashes. The sheer frustration in trying to read a book or mail then switching to the browser to look something up was surreal for a device still in its infancy.

For me this was completely unacceptable for a sub £500 device aswell as what is one of its primary functions. All i can say is lessoned learned. It is an otherwise fast and powerful device but if you someone who is poor with app management or browses with alot of tabs open, i would steer clear unless you are a very patient person.

 

[Freyqq]

All less ram means is that less apps can exist in the cache before they have to be reloaded upon opening. Unlike OSX and Windows, iOS does not cache to the disk at all.