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iPad mini iPad mini = back to 512MB of RAM
- Thread starter klover
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Ram, No you guys are way off the mark. This forum is about electronics, Apple products, and specifically ipads. Not animals, you must have been looking for some zoo forum, talking about Ram's and sheep and all. LOL
Jeez you guys, do a little reading before you post.
um, completely wrong.
one version of an app still contains both non-retina and retina assets. the device you're on just chooses to load the appropriate version.
512MB for a non-retina 7.9" device is fine.
I see no issue with a non-retina screen iPad and iOS 6, the benchmarks show it performs similarly to a iPad 2 and 3, only being beaten handily but the (brand new) iPad 4.
THE PROBLEM is iOS 7! Apple has had 512 mb in the iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and the last few iPod touches. All have seen the upgrades from iOS 4 to 5 to 6. The problem is the new iPhone 5 and iPad 3 and 4 have 1 GB of memory and are ready for an expansion of the iOS in 7 that hasn't been done for several years fitting into the 1GB space. I feel it is likely that 7.0 WILL still run on the iPad mini and iPhone 4S but with limited features and slowly.
The last time Apple surprisingly offered a product with LESS memory than other iOS devices it was selling at the same time? The iPad 1. Guess which device has already been dropped from iOS upgrades because of it? iPad 1. I hope history doesn't repeat itself.
THE PROBLEM is iOS 7! Apple has had 512 mb in the iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and the last few iPod touches. All have seen the upgrades from iOS 4 to 5 to 6. The problem is the new iPhone 5 and iPad 3 and 4 have 1 GB of memory and are ready for an expansion of the iOS in 7 that hasn't been done for several years fitting into the 1GB space. I feel it is likely that 7.0 WILL still run on the iPad mini and iPhone 4S but with limited features and slowly.
The last time Apple surprisingly offered a product with LESS memory than other iOS devices it was selling at the same time? The iPad 1. Guess which device has already been dropped from iOS upgrades because of it? iPad 1. I hope history doesn't repeat itself.
True, but many do as well.
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Honestly, my wife's iPad 2 seems a little snappier than my iPad 3. The biggest issue with only having 512mb RAM is the reloading of tabs. My iPad 3 never has to reload tabs, the iPad 2 start reloading tabs after opening 5 or 6 sometimes.
I'm not. That way, they can put 1gb in the mini 2 next year(?) and call it a massive improvement and a must have upgrade.
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iPad 1 started on iOS 3 and was upgraded to iOS 4 and iOS 5. I would suspect the Mini to be perfect capable on iOS 7 and won't be severely limited until iOS 8.
Something that runs everything made for it in the environment/ecosystem isn't obsolete. Once things don't run or don't function THEN you can make that statement.
The math on this is wrong. Even if we take as granted that the cost is $2 (it's more than that) and that they'd sell an extra 200,000 by going to 1GB (almost certainly a huge overestimation), that's an additional $40.5 million in costs for their 20.2 million units. Let's be particularly generous to your numbers and assume that they have managed to get the unit cost down to $230, putting the gross margin at 30% (which tracks with information about the mini falling well below corporate average of 40%) and that a typical 20% overhead applies--in other words, net profit is 10% (reality is probably closer to 5).
What all that means is that for the $40.5 million increase in expenses, they are actually only bringing in an additional $6.6 million in cash by increasing sales. They would need to sell over 1.2 million additional units to make that up--and there's no way that there are that many people out there who would buy one if only it had a little more RAM. A few thousand people, maybe.
At a more realistic $4 and 5%, that's about $81M needing an increase of 5 million units to recoup that cost. That just would not happen.
Why because it'll make your current device stop working? You don't have to keep up with Apple's release schedule.
But performance went down hill as soon as ios 4 came to the iPad 1 due to lack of memory.
It may have got ios4 and ios5 but day to day performance was pretty shocking. Safari was particularly bad, just check out the Apple forums if you don't believe me.
I have iPad 1 on 5.1.1. It still runs ok. It still meets my needs. It can be slow if you open multiple tabs, but that should be expected.
I am upgrading to the Mini, because I want something smaller, lighter and more portable. I don't need a powerhouse as a tablet. I have computer for that.
soooooo...any news???
Yes. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Mini+Teardown/11423/3 If we go by track record, this is definitively a 512MB device (I cannot remember the last time iFixit got something like this wrong). It appears to be the exact same cpu/memory module as the latest iPod Touch--which makes imminent sense from a production-run point-of-view. From a future-proofing point-of-view, 1GB would have been nice because who knows what iOS 6 and 7 will be like. There is a point of diminishing returns, but the usefulness life of the original iPad was cut short, I think, by the inclusion of only 256MB of ram.
So maybe iPad mini buyers (like me) should plan for no more than a couple of years of "first tier" OS support. There are so many iPad 2 owners out there that I would assume app developers would continue very good support for this type of device for a couple of years minimum, too.
Don't ignore the RAM!
I've been playing the Apple game for a while, people should seriously pay attention to RAM.
There is a reason why Apple don't list RAM explicitly in their spec. RAM is secondary layer in phasing out products.
Apple phase out product primary using iOS upgrades and if people are still hanging on to their old products, running older iOS, they won't have enough RAM to run new applications that will need larger amount of RAM.
Over time iOS and applications gets larger, adding more functionality and graphics enhancements, which takes up more RAM.
Every application needs to be loaded into RAM to run, along with the Operating system.
Not enough memory will cause the device to run slow or simply force shut down of the application. The unresponsiveness and crashes you experience from older device are because of your device has ran out of memory, not because it has a old CPU.
People feel their old device is slow, but in fact a lot of time they just don't have the memory to run it.
if you have abundant of RAM, even if you have a slow CPU or GPU, you will run the application slower, but for most iOS application you won't know the difference since only a small portion of games that require more processing and graphical power.
If a iPad 1 had 1gb of ram it will run most apps in the app store as good a ipad 3 with 1gb. A ipad 1 is slow because most of the time it can hardly load a single application in 256ram.
Adding more ram would not be expensive, but it would break people out of the upgrade cycle. It is good business sense to keep everyone contained within the upgrade cycle by phasing product out using RAM and iOS.
Ram Hierarchy
iPad 3, iPad 4, iPhone 5 - 1 Gb (Last to be phased out)
iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch 5,iPad 2, iPad mini - 512mb (Next to be phased out)
iPad 1, iPod touch 4 - 256 (Phased out.)
This is a good example, iPad 1 is phased out using iOS and RAM, while iPod Touch 4 can use iOS 6 but it runs it so slowly, that you will wish you didn't upgrade. The appstore search constantly crashes because it cannot load the search results into RAM.
To summarize the iPad mini is not dead on arrival, but just has a shorter life than the other devices, this is largely because it is a 1st generation device, this is exactly same thing they did with iPad. People are buying first generation for the new experience they don't know what to expect, all they have to do in the next generation is up the RAM and the second generation will feel so much better than the first.
As a point of reference, I have ipod touch 1&4, iPhone 4, iPad 1,2 & 3. I have played their game long enough to know what they are really doing, and I've learned what devices should be skipped. iPad 1 was mostly a mistake, but it was a enjoyable experience since it was first gen. iPhone any generation that end with S will have less excitement, they are just enhanced spec version of something that is already been out for a while and they will get phased out at the same time as the non enhanced version. iPad (4 Gen) is basically a Ipad 3S, is something that I would skip (If they increase the RAM in S editions, I would consider buying, but If you read half of what I've been saying, or If you know apple well, you know they would not increase the RAM even if you beg them.)
This is all in consideration of more bang for the buck, if you don't care about the cost, just throw out everything I said in this post.
iPad Mini will have 1st gen excitement, but it will be phased out faster like the other mid cycle products. Take that into consideration.
I've been playing the Apple game for a while, people should seriously pay attention to RAM.
There is a reason why Apple don't list RAM explicitly in their spec. RAM is secondary layer in phasing out products.
Apple phase out product primary using iOS upgrades and if people are still hanging on to their old products, running older iOS, they won't have enough RAM to run new applications that will need larger amount of RAM.
Over time iOS and applications gets larger, adding more functionality and graphics enhancements, which takes up more RAM.
Every application needs to be loaded into RAM to run, along with the Operating system.
Not enough memory will cause the device to run slow or simply force shut down of the application. The unresponsiveness and crashes you experience from older device are because of your device has ran out of memory, not because it has a old CPU.
People feel their old device is slow, but in fact a lot of time they just don't have the memory to run it.
if you have abundant of RAM, even if you have a slow CPU or GPU, you will run the application slower, but for most iOS application you won't know the difference since only a small portion of games that require more processing and graphical power.
If a iPad 1 had 1gb of ram it will run most apps in the app store as good a ipad 3 with 1gb. A ipad 1 is slow because most of the time it can hardly load a single application in 256ram.
Adding more ram would not be expensive, but it would break people out of the upgrade cycle. It is good business sense to keep everyone contained within the upgrade cycle by phasing product out using RAM and iOS.
Ram Hierarchy
iPad 3, iPad 4, iPhone 5 - 1 Gb (Last to be phased out)
iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch 5,iPad 2, iPad mini - 512mb (Next to be phased out)
iPad 1, iPod touch 4 - 256 (Phased out.)
This is a good example, iPad 1 is phased out using iOS and RAM, while iPod Touch 4 can use iOS 6 but it runs it so slowly, that you will wish you didn't upgrade. The appstore search constantly crashes because it cannot load the search results into RAM.
To summarize the iPad mini is not dead on arrival, but just has a shorter life than the other devices, this is largely because it is a 1st generation device, this is exactly same thing they did with iPad. People are buying first generation for the new experience they don't know what to expect, all they have to do in the next generation is up the RAM and the second generation will feel so much better than the first.
As a point of reference, I have ipod touch 1&4, iPhone 4, iPad 1,2 & 3. I have played their game long enough to know what they are really doing, and I've learned what devices should be skipped. iPad 1 was mostly a mistake, but it was a enjoyable experience since it was first gen. iPhone any generation that end with S will have less excitement, they are just enhanced spec version of something that is already been out for a while and they will get phased out at the same time as the non enhanced version. iPad (4 Gen) is basically a Ipad 3S, is something that I would skip (If they increase the RAM in S editions, I would consider buying, but If you read half of what I've been saying, or If you know apple well, you know they would not increase the RAM even if you beg them.)
This is all in consideration of more bang for the buck, if you don't care about the cost, just throw out everything I said in this post.
iPad Mini will have 1st gen excitement, but it will be phased out faster like the other mid cycle products. Take that into consideration.
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The iPad 3 has 1gb of ram and was phased out quicker than any of them
You mistake what he means by 'phased out.' In all likelihood the iPad 3 will receive updates for a long time yet - possibly as long as the iPad 4, and almost certainly for longer than the iPad Mini.
Doubtful. More likely that all A5-based products get dropped around the same time, including the iPad 3. Really, the A4-based iPhone 4 is still going to be on sale for roughly the next year, so it'll be a while.
iFixit confirms iPad mini has 512MB RAM, has the exact same A5 chip as the iPod touch 5. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Mini+Teardown/11423/1