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Interesting,
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't a web page on the iPad use the same amount of RAM as on the iPhone 3GS?
On the iPhone 3GS, you see a full webpage in portrait just really small, on the iPad you see a full webpage just much larger, does that require more RAM or not?

All I can think is that the iPad OS has a larger RAM overhead than the iPhone OS, which makes sense given the extra bits and pieces that have been added to the iPad to make use of the extra screen space. That would leave proportionally less RAM for Safari to keep tabs loaded in RAM - a sort of regression back to what the iPhone 3G was like.
 
It certainly wouldn't, $5.95 to be exact. SOC space shouldn't of been a concern because they could of used higher density chips. Thermal envelope, the thing doesn't get hot period. Power consumption, we're talking miliWatts extra for Multitasking capability, definitely worth it.

If you use higher density chips, would it still be $5.95 extra?
 
In theory, that's all nice and dandy. The problem in the real world, however, is that today's DSLRs produce RAW images that have 50MB+ in size per photo, that movies in 1080p are easily 4 to 8 GBs big and that an average high quality mp3 also easily has more than 10 MB.

You would not use an iPad to manipulate this kind of things. Most people don't deal with RAW images and HD video or do any manipulation at all.

To quote Steve Jobs about what the iPad should be better at: "Enjoying and sharing photographs. Video. Watching videos. Enjoying your music collection."
 
If you use higher density chips, would it still be $5.95 extra?
Yes, that's what the original estimate was, for the 512MB chips. $11.90 for DRAM.

2010-02-10_Apple%20iPad.jpg
 
The JooJoo is a competitor. Looks about the same, has decent software. Also has a gigabyte of RAM.

Umm not really.

They have solid like 90, and 75 of those have asked for their money back.


(not made up numbers).
 
I just want to read my Twitter stream and see what my friends are doing on Facebook. Then I want to check out the menus from a few restaurants around town so I can decide where I want to eat. Then I want a map so I can get there. When I get home maybe I want to watch an episode of Lost that I missed last week because I have a life. And I want all this in 2 minutes flat, without having to Google all over the whole damn internet.

I'm 21 years old, and I know that 95% of my friends don't care at all about what the specs on any computing device are. They just want the thing to work, and be fast at what they want it to do. They don't want the battery to die in 2 hours. They don't want to have to hack the thing, and they don't want to spend a week trying to get it to work the way they want.


With all respects...If that's all you want a computer for that, then why don't you just get yourself a nice little Dell laptop, if you just want to p1ss about on the internet, and it would be cheaper than a iPad?
And for your information, the iPad battery will die just as fast as the iPhone battery, once you start using all the apps.
(which you and your friends will use in time, before you get sucked into iPad v.2.0)
 
Steve Jobs says its better than a netbook. The dudes at the Apple Store say its a netbook killer.

Steve Jobs said that for a tablet to be successful it has to be perform certain tasks better than a smartphone and a laptop. And he said that netbooks are not that, they are just cheap laptops.

He then proceeded to go through what kind of tasks such a device needed to be better at: browsing, email, photos, video, music and games. And the focus was not on creation or manipulation of the above mentioned things, but consumin.

And I think a case can be made that the iPad is better than netbooks at doing these things.
 
yeah Apple strongly agrees that the iPad slots between the computer and phone. the iPad is great for lots of tasks, but a computer is better for more intense tasks and the iPhone can just fit in your pocket.
 
As long as netbooks are in locked in a death-grip of price competition - the iPad will stand out as "a darn comfortable place to spend a couple hours a day of your life"

Small screen, clattery keyboard, general air of "look how cheap I am!" vs the futuristic new machine from 'the company other companies wish they could beat - if only their customers weren't so stingy'.
 
This came as slightly worrying news until I remembered what I can do with my 16MB (multitasking) Amiga.

256MB should be enough for anyone.. ;)

I can see the disappointment though. I'm a little surprised Apple would go *this* against the grain of whats popularly considered normal specs, I imagine it'll confuse competitors a bit too.

I wonder how the ipad will evolve.

I used to write on Office and do presentations as well all heavy word processing work on 64 mb Sony Vaio. I used Photoshop and Illustrator and Pagemaker on LC 630 with 12 mb of ram and played Doom and Marathon on it. My LC didn't have even a special videocard. Its speed was 33 mhz and it had 350 mb of hard drive.

This is less than 5% of ram memory of iPad and less than 3% of iPad's flash memory which is immeasurably faster than old IDE drive.

I guess that with highly specialized OS, which doesn't spend mountains of RAM on background processes, 256 is enough, especially with specialized GPU PowerVR and enough for general consumer tasks.
 
Without that kludgy keyboard dock emails on the iPad had best be short. It is impossible to touch type on it. You can 'guess type' on it and rely on iPad OS to correct it, but invariably it will make mistakes.
 
I used to write on Office and do presentations as well all heavy word processing work on 64 mb Sony Vaio. I used Photoshop and Illustrator and Pagemaker on LC 630 with 12 mb of ram and played Doom and Marathon on it.

This is less than 4% of memory of iPad.

That's the point I guess. Those older programs had a smaller RAM footprint. And the iPad apps have a small RAM footprint too with the iPhone OS being optimized for better memory management.
 
Albeit a very small issue, I tend to agree.

Are we absolutely sure that the tabs in Safari reloading are because of lack of RAM? Doesn't it write the data to a page file on the device when it runs out?

I use Safari on my iPod Touch everyday and I never had this problem (I usually have two or three tabs open). And how much RAm iPod Touch 2G has? iStat reports 52 MB. 256 is more than enough.
 
The Good Old Days when 64K was Enough...

I used to write on Office and do presentations as well all heavy word processing work on 64 mb Sony Vaio. I used Photoshop and Illustrator and Pagemaker on LC 630 with 12 mb of ram and played Doom and Marathon on it.

This is less than 4% of memory of iPad.

The guys at Adobe are always awaiting for new hardware to come out so they can see how much resources they can suck with their next Creative Suite release:confused: . I'm pretty sure Photoshop et al have some "Dummy Tasks" running in the background just for the sake of filling up the CPU. I'm positive.
 
Thats not the message guys. If you stop, take a deep breath from the angst and hype that so easily clouds and think about how Apple (Steve) works you'll get a better idea of what its about.

They're thinking revolution from the ground up, that is, from the simple users and when the timing is right, they'll think about the pros.

On the contrary, by the time Jobs thinks the time is right and they get around to the pros, the pros will already have done the revolting and left Apple by the millions. And bereft of their millions of dollars of purchasing power.

Blu-ray, basic flash implementation, firewire ports, matte screens, the list goes on and on; the things pros have been screaming for that Jobs have decided his core audience of nine year olds don't need.

Jobs will never get another penny of my $15,000+/year computer budget ever again. And I'm not alone. Most pros have quit complaining in disgust after they've gone elsewhere.

When it comes to the future, Jobs is a fool and a charlatan chasing the next ephermal easily copied (better and cheaper by the Chinese) fad while Apple's bread and butter goes into the dust. It's not just that Apple computers are obsolete; it's Jobs who has made them so on purpose.

:apple:
 
It is impossible to touch type on it.

Reckon keyboards are being designed in the far east as we speak.

the rubber sheeting with conductive pads that you get in tv remotes would roll up into a cigar tube and give you the tactile feedback to touch type.
 
Reckon keyboards are being designed in the far east as we speak.

the rubber sheeting with conductive pads that you get in tv remotes would roll up into a cigar tube and give you the tactile feedback to touch type.

That may be the future although it's hard to believe Steve would give a thumbs up to that existing on his minimalistic hardware - and that's a compliment to Steve's taste. However as it exists today one cannot actually touch type on the iPad.
 
That may be the future although it's hard to believe Steve would give a thumbs up to that existing on his minimalistic hardware - and that's a compliment to Steve's taste.

Oh - no doubt. :D

It won't be an official apple accessory - but it will be available on Ebay for £5 by summer.
 
This is really all meaningless since they don't run the same OSes. What should be considered is whether the hardware is sufficient for running the OS. I'd say if Safari has to reload tabs because it's run out of ram, then 256mb is not sufficient.

The thing with game consoles is, the OS practically does not get in the way (I remember that the PS3 reserves 64MB or something, though).

The only way to tell if the iPad RAM is enough is to use it a lot :)
 
It certainly wouldn't, $5.95 to be exact.
Not to be exact, no. The number you quote is a semi-informed estimate based on market prices. It is a good approximation, but nothing more.
SOC space shouldn't of been a concern because they could of used higher density chips.
It's not a question of density. The RAM is an integrated part of the A4 itself--not separately acquired or installed on the logic board. Far from "shouldn't have been" a concern, it's in fact a key concern.
Thermal envelope, the thing doesn't get hot period.
Exactly. This is because the TDP of the system is very carefully managed, meaning more silicon used for the SOC=more heat in a small area, affecting the cooling performance of the entire device.
Power consumption, we're talking miliWatts extra for Multitasking capability, definitely worth it.
On a system that draws less than 2.5W under load, a few mW is a big deal.
 
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