Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
ios always needed half of what android needs....so for 2020, samsung will have 8 and 12 gb ram, pro iphone models will have 6gb ram
The Note 10+ already has 12 GB of RAM ... and it's actually quite nice. You can have a billion things open. Right now iOS 13 has been suffering from a bit of overzealous background app issues. There are no downsides to Apple increasing the RAM on the iPhone. Yes, Android is more RAM hungry ... but more RAM is always a good thing.
 
  • Like
Reactions: HandITOVER
Try being that guy that understands the current situation of memory requirements rather than parroting that false narrative of os efficiency. Fact is not enough is NOT ENOUGH when browser tabs have to reload. Besides reloading RAM wastes battery so where's the efficiency regarding that. iOS ain't the prom queen anymore, she's bloated & buggy and making excuses to make do with less is no excuse at all.

Try being that guy that understands the memory management of iOS. Safari in iOS deliberately limits the amount of memory used. Just because you might have 8GB of free memory in future iPhones doesn't mean Safari will use all of 8GB to keep tabs live. Safari wants to be a good citizen in iOS so it is mindful of how much memory is used. Why would Safari do this? Well, reloading tabs does not use as much battery as launching a new app from a cold start. For example: let's say you have 8 apps in the background, but you launched 10 new tabs in Safari. If Safari used all of the available ram, those 8 apps in the background will be closed. Launching those 8 apps from a cold start instead of resuming from background would use substantially more battery than reloading 10 tabs (and I'm factoring in the LTE usage).

Whether you have 4GB ram today, or 6GB of ram tomorrow, you're still going to have tabs being refreshed. It's just how Safari in iOS was designed.
 
Last edited:
While I'm technically all in for more RAM it will make the devices that have 3G or less RAM obsolete quite quickly as Apps will just waste a lot of RAM (like Outlook does) instead of being coded efficiently.

However, all the RAM remains mostly useless without the ability to minimize apps instead of leaving it to the OS to suspend the app. See also network connections of apps being put to background. I'd much appreciate real multitasking...
 
RAM is a relatively cheap component & your defending Apple being stingy with it while taking a swipe at developers.
I believe you'll find the primary reason for not shoving a bunch more RAM into the iPhone is power consumption, not cost.

Funny I don't hear folks complaining about having up to 1.5TB of RAM in the Mac Pro crying "that's too much".
The power and thermal situation in a desktop (or floorstanding) computer is vastly different than in a 1/4" thick phone with no active cooling. And the use cases are, for the most part, vastly different too. A Falcon 9 rocket has many orders of magnitude more power output than your car. Yet I don't hear you complaining that the Falcon 9 has too much power. Perhaps that's because they each have power output that's appropriate for their (very different) use cases.
 
4gb more memory? Really?
No.

Uh yes. All Android apps can leave long running services even when app is in background to do arbitrary tasks. Even Android's developer docs say that using services unnecessarily is the worst memory management tasks a developer can do.

With iOS, most apps can't run a background service unless they're using live location, recording via mic, playing streaming music, or connected to a custom bluetooth peripheral. Facebook at one point kept the audio alive with a silent noise so that when a user put Facebook in background, the app is able to run tasks.

Also Android utilizes garbage collection. iOS doesn't have garbage collection. Garbage collection waits until memory is low before objects are deleted from memory. It's awful for mobile devices. iOS uses reference counters which in the past, created more work for developers but created a leaner app. Today however, Apple lets the compilers handle most of the reference counting work.
 
Last edited:
It is not right because the iPhone with 4GB of RAM needs to reload its app more often than ANDROID SMARTPHONE using 6-8GB RAM.
No, thats not really correct. -As iOS manage memory much better than Android, 4 GB in iOS would pretty much match 8 GB of mem in Android. So I would make the claim that they would reload apps same amount of time, if that is your concern.
 
They should have 8GB of ram to not just 'catch up' to where Samsung was 4 years ago. Just make sure nightmode works on Ultrawide Lens and improve camera quality beyond Samsung and iPhone 12 will be competitive.
 
This next go around, I definitely won't be getting another Pro Max. Especially if the resolution is the same. I'll be going for the Pro.

I think this Pro Max was great in terms of audio quality and battery but I'm just not happy with the screen.

I did get a replacement at the Apple store for my first Pro Max, it showed terribly mute colors. It was painful to look at. It failed the diagnostics. The replacement is better but I'm still finding myself drawn more to my LG G8 ThinQ. It's perfect to me.

We'll see in 15 months when my upgrade is up.
 
Try being that guy that understands the memory management of iOS. Safari in iOS deliberately limits the amount of memory used. Just because you might have 8GB of free memory in future iPhones doesn't mean Safari will use all of 8GB to keep tabs live. Safari wants to be a good citizen in iOS so it is mindful of how much memory is used. Why would Safari do this? Well, reloading tabs does not use as much battery as launching a new app from a cold start. For example: let's say you have 8 apps in the background, but you launched 10 new tabs in Safari. If Safari used all of the available ram, those 8 apps in the background will be closed. Launching those 8 apps from a cold start instead of resuming from background would use substantially more battery than reloading 10 tabs (and I'm factoring in the LTE usage).

Whether you have 4GB ram today, or 6GB of ram tomorrow, you're still going to have tabs being refreshed. It's just how Safari in iOS was designed.

But on the flip side, reloading tabs uses more data, thus powers the antenna for longer periods of time more freuqently also leading to battery drain.

what this ultimately shows is that Apple's typical lack of RAM combined with weird limits on applications use of that memory combine for some odd unecessary behaviours that maybe easily remedied, thus being more efficient by increasing those limits and providing more memory.

however, one of the problems entirely with what you've said above (uness I misread) is that iOS doesn't keep apps open in the background for longer than 2 minutes. Regardless of what other memory load is on. When you task switch back to a long "idled" app, it is being reloaded from storage into memory. Thus negating the benefit you claimed.

the majority of Apple's "Multitasking" in IOS is not actually multitasking, but clever user of ap shutdown an snapshoting the memory to load it back up when you return. they have just done an amazing job at making that seem seemless
 
So is the implication that the only phones with a telephoto lens are the pro models? So you have to buy a giant phone to get a telephoto lens? I would really prefer if the 5.4" model had the 1x and 2x lens, but based on the XR, I doubt it.
 
The problem isn't just tabs but every background app require to reload or sometimes crash due to 4GB RAM and that's going to be even worse in the future for new version of OS. 6GB of RAM can increase the battery life by not reloading the app or tab and developer can be assured of less headache for supporting every model of iPhone 12.
Yes, battery life is always a balancing act, where additional RAM uses more battery. So whether there is a net zero is hard to determine.
 
It shows there is no perfect solution for incorporating a lot of tech into a small space in these mobile devices. Pick what you like best, but someone else may not like the same thing.

Don't cut the screen space, at all. The screen should be an uninterrupted rectangle no matter what else they're trying to do with the device. If this was done with TVs for any reason, people would lose their minds.

In the smartphone market we just *shrug*
 
  • Like
Reactions: I7guy
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.