iPhone 18 Rumored to Feature 50% More RAM

[EugW]

To be fair on that I had no idea how much RAM mine has. I don't give a crap

You may give a crap in a few years... It seems the big memory hog is AI. I have a 5 year old 12 Pro Max with 6 GB RAM and performance is decent, but it doesn't support AI.

I dunno why but I totally missed or forget base iPhone 17 had 8gb

Thought they all were 12gb this year

Apple's usual pattern over the years has been to give the memory upgrades first to the Pro models (and the Air this year too), and then the non-Pro models follow after that.

I was just a little bit surprised that my kid's "budget" model 16e also got 8 GB RAM, which is one reason I bought that over the more expensive 15 which has 6 GB RAM and no AI support. (The refurb 15 Pro refurbs weren't available at that time, and the 16 didn't seem like a good value at an even higher price. Too bad we couldn't have waited a few more months for the 17.)

 

[boswald]

They haven't even launched anything meaningful as "Apple Intelligence" yet and they're already suggesting adding a ton of more RAM? No doubt this will bump up performance, but also the price. This is nearly a penny-pinching economy so I don't know how Apple will pull it off. Maybe I'm just pessimistic.

 

[kobberrød]

So the RAM is independent from the SoC on the ‘A’ series? Then the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air is actually just a base A19? (No USB 3.0, one GPU core missing, lower clock speed than the Pro versions, no video output over USB-C)

Did Apple mislead us on this one?

This is interesting. What about cache sizes then? Clearly Apple has more chip variants than marketing names.

 

[EugW]

They haven't even launched anything meaningful as "Apple Intelligence" yet and they're already suggesting adding a ton of more RAM? No doubt this will bump up performance, but also the price. This is nearly a penny-pinching economy so I don't know how Apple will pull it off. Maybe I'm just pessimistic.

I like the Photos Cleanup feature for example. It doesn't require the full AI suite but it does use AI and is only supported on the 8 GB iPhones.

I suspect the price will not change. 12 GB RAM is already cheap.

 

[Dfor83]

Let’s just hope they don’t give the iPhone 18 the M4 iPad Pro treatment, where they give it 12 GB RAM but deactivate 4 GB.

I really don’t understand why apple does this.

 

[Dfor83]

To be fair on that I had no idea how much RAM mine has. I don't give a crap

You would if you only had 4 GB and noticed apps refreshing and losing info when going from one app to another and staying to long and then possibly losing info you expected to see when going back.

 

[Dfor83]

Since my 16 pro max gets worse battery life than my 13 pro max did, guess I will be upgrading next year. Excited that my brand new awesome shiny 18 Pro Max that runs subpar Apple Intelligence, will have the same battery life as my 13! Woohoo!

Maybe do a factory reset especially if you started using iOS 26. I’ve warned others not to upgrade due to that. Likely you’ll see the same thing if you upgrade to another phone.

 

[citysnaps]

I like the Photos Cleanup feature for example. It doesn't require the full AI suite but it does use AI and is only supported on the 8 GB iPhones.

I suspect the price will not change. 12 GB RAM is already cheap.

Spot-on.

I'd also add the ability to quickly sort through large photo libraries (28 to 30 thousand photos for me) on one's iPhone by content. For example: Find blue cars with motorcycles and dogs.

 

[Dfor83]

Wondered why they’d stopped putting ‘Built for Apple Intelligence’ on everything, this must be it for real this time. Maybe

What a scam that was

Because they haven’t been able to release it and clearly they don’t know what they’re doing

 

[Robert.Walter]

iPhone 18, IOW iPhones 27.

 

[Le0M]

You must be living under a rock. My M4 Mac Mini sports 24GB of RAM.

Something is seriously wrong with your battery or you are doing something wrong. My iPhone 16 PM lasts the same as my 13 PM even when set to 80% charge limit. It has an 8% bigger battery and is 11% more efficient.

People who hate seeing their apps unable to hold memory while switching around apps just don't realize that it's mostly due to RAM constraints. 16GB would be much welcomed by many, myself included.

Most times, unfortunately, that app behavior is a developers' choice that has nothing to do with ram.

 

[MilaM]

Oh, interesting. Maybe I should wait another year with my upgrade then? 12 vs 8 GB is quite a leap. My current phone only has 4 GB RAM 🙈.

 

[lewchenko]

The regular 17 should have come with 12 ! Pure apple penny pinching is the only reason it doesnt. Almost as infuriating as charging £200 for minor bumps in storage/ memory on their computers too. But that's Apple for you..

 

[Kendo]

8GB is the reason I didn't go for the regular 17. As an iPhone 14 Pro owner who had apps and tabs constantly reloading with the paltry 6GB RAM, it was only a matter of time that 8GB wouldn't be enough.

 

[delsoul]

Phones are already fast enough. 50% more ram to watch some YouTube videos, etc…this is what not just Apple, but the entire tech industry has become. They’re out of actual ideas and keep rehashing anything they can.

 

[bmark]

All iPhone 18 versions will have 12GB or more memory. Why? Memory makes AI faster. So people are asking for more memory. Samsung's LPDDR5X memory only comes in 12GB or 16GB versions.

Everyone doesn't care about AI!

 

[TwoBytes]

Does the AI stuff really require such large amounts of RAM?
Tor the average users using ChatGPT asking cooking tips and whatever else, isn't that just sent to the server and the back again?

Pre AI boom, there were lots of Photoshop-esque cleanup apps without such large amounts of RAM for years.

 

[vantelimus]

At this rate, in 2040, iPhones will have 300GB of RAM and Macs will still only have 16GB

I've got 512GB on my Mac. Maybe shell out a little more money if you need more memory.

 

[hans1972]

So the RAM is independent from the SoC on the ‘A’ series? Then the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air is actually just a base A19? (No USB 3.0, one GPU core missing, lower clock speed than the Pro versions, no video output over USB-C)

Did Apple mislead us on this one?

SoC (System on Chip) = CPU, GPU, NPU, I/O controllers, cache, etc.

PoP* (Package on Package) = SoC + RAM

So it's not that difficult or expensive to vary the RAM while still using the same SoC.



*PoP is sometimes called SiP (System in Package).

 

[smorrissey]

and 19 or 20 16gb ram blah blah blah it always the same with Apple little by little.

 

[MrSnirf]

iOS does not need more RAM because it is efficient, they need to reduce the RAM not increase it. Only Android needs more RAM./s

 

[CATiNTHESTORE]

just in case price goes up for the ram already, so be prepared for even more expensive iPhone

 

[ebika]

Does the AI stuff really require such large amounts of RAM?
Tor the average users using ChatGPT asking cooking tips and whatever else, isn't that just sent to the server and the back again?

Pre AI boom, there were lots of Photoshop-esque cleanup apps without such large amounts of RAM for years.

Sometimes. ChatGPT is all cloud-based right now, so very little computation is happening on the device. Various providers have tiny models that can run entirely locally (and offline) such as Google's Gemma 3n. It's an arms race to develop tiny models that can do enough useful stuff while fitting into the hardware specs of phones and without choking out everything else on the phone. It's a juggling act, and the field is changing rapidly.

Like @Le0M said, RAM usage isn't always responsible for crappy app-reloading experience. It's a mixture of whatever the app dev coded it to do (and bugs) and how the OS handles memory. Apple could probably use more storage as swap space, but they picked their middle ground. Throwing more RAM at it doesn't always solve everything I read people attributing RAM starvation to.

 

[iPhoneFan5349]

Can someone please tell me what they are doing on their phone that makes 8gb of ram not enough?

Since 8gb on a phone is good enough for 99% of people why not just lower the price of the phone a few bucks instead?

AI. Obviously you haven’t used it at all.

 

[Jordan Klein]

About to head to the Apple store to return the iPhone 17 that I bought a few days ago to replace my 16. I'll wait until the 18 is out and get an additional 4GB of RAM. Not really enough features on the 17 to justify the cost since I only got the 16 a year ago. If I hadn't seen this article, I'd have kept the 17. Sorry Apple!