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iPhone 4S only has 512MB of RAM

Thats disappointing, I expected 1GB RAM. Its all Apple's strategy, the next iPhone will claim this as a top feature. Even worse look at iPod Touch, it didn't even get A5 and 512MB RAM.


jav6454 said:
Apple does more with less, and that is always crucial.
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Its actually their strategy. Look at iPad 1, it had 256MB RAM and I'm sure Apple knew it was insufficient for a tablet. 512MB in iPad 2 was a top feature which made people upgrade. Same goes to the cameras on iPod Touch and iPad 2. They intentionally cripple the hardware so that people upgrade every generation. iPod Touch didn't even get 512MB RAM and A5 processor. As you said, its the efficiency of iOS that makes up.
 
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DeathChill said:
They did it with the A4. I agree that it is kind of silly to make two variants but it must make financial sense if Apple did it.
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that's what I was thinking... If I remember correctly the iPhone 4 dropped with more ram than the iPad 1... at least until the iPad 1 was replaced.
 
It's true that iOS has better memory management than Android but that doesn't mean it should stay at 512MB.

Even if a 512MB on iOS were as good as a 1GB on Android, 1GB is what we see on current Android phones. Apple can't just match the competition when they release a new product, given their slow release cycle. They have to blow it out of the water so that competitors struggle to match Apple's performance until a new model is released a year later.

They did a pretty good job on that part with all other iPhones and iPads in the past. Now I feel like the 4S will feel ridiculously outdated 10 months from now with all the fast Android releases.

If you look at the iPhone 4, it took months to release competitors that weren't really superior specs-wise (Droid X, Evo, Nexus S, Galaxy S). Now that we see that Apple is lagging in terms of form-factor and more and more people are attracted to larger phones, I would have at least hoped that they would stay strong on the hardware side. They are definitely also lagging in hardware when you compare it to previous years and their competitors.
 
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I thought iPhones had more RAM than iPads in general? An iPad you play on, an iPhone you communicate with so thats why i thought the iPhone always got more RAM.
 
pgiguere1 said:
It's true that iOS has better memory management than Android but that doesn't mean it should stay at 512MB.

Even if a 512MB on iOS were as good as a 1GB on Android, 1GB is what we see on current Android phones. Apple can't just match the competition when they release a new product, given their slow release cycle. They have to blow it out of the water so that competitors struggle to match Apple's performance until a new model is released a year later.

They did a pretty good job on that part with all other iPhones and iPads in the past. Now I feel like the 4S will feel ridiculously outdated 10 months from now with all the fast Android releases.

If you look at the iPhone 4, it took months to release competitors that weren't really superior specs-wise (Droid X, Nexus S, Galaxy S). Now that we see that Apple is lagging in terms of form-factor and more and more people are attracted to larger phones, I would have at least hoped that they would stay strong on the hardware side. They are definitely also lagging in hardware when you compare it to previous years and their competitors.
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Truthfully you make no sense...

I'm sorry, but why do you need any more ram than is needed to operate the OS, the app you are using, and potentially the 1 or 2 active apps in the background?

It's not as if the solid state memory used for the actual hard storage is all that slow anyway... I honestly don't care if I have to wait 2-3 seconds for an app to load as long as once it's open, it runs fast.

Most smart phones are essentially always using what windows refers to superfetch. It's not as if there is a hard disk in there and seek time to deal with... if something that's inactive and running in the background is wasting resources.... dump it to flash.
 
pgiguere1 said:
It's true that iOS has better memory management than Android but that doesn't mean it should stay at 512MB.

Even if a 512MB on iOS were as good as a 1GB on Android, 1GB is what we see on current Android phones. Apple can't just match the competition when they release a new product, given their slow release cycle. They have to blow it out of the water so that competitors struggle to match Apple's performance until a new model is released a year later.
Click to expand...

Wait a minute. So if Android were to require 2GB ram for the system itself and demanded at least 1GB for app space while iOS required only 256MB for the system then Apple should add at least 3GB of ram? Because everyone else is doing it?

Hmm....

Now that we see that Apple is lagging in terms of form-factor and more and more people are attracted to larger phones, I would have at least hoped that they would stay strong on the hardware side. They are definitely also lagging in hardware when you compare it to previous years and their competitors.
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I agree. People are obviously pretty unhappy with the design. I mean, it took AT&T nearly 12 hours to clear 200,000 orders. What took so long????!?1!
 
Amnesia87 said:
...

It's not as if the solid state memory used for the actual hard storage is all that slow anyway... I honestly don't care if I have to wait 2-3 seconds for an app to load as long as once it's open, it runs fast.


....
Click to expand...

I left out the best part of your post. This is exactly why you don't need a large amount of RAM in your iPhone.

In computers it makes sense because the swap is in the Hard Disk which is by definition, slow. Add to that the slower interface to it. So in a computer having more RAM than needed is always good.

On a smartphone, the main storage is composed of NAND Flash modules, which are the building blocks for SSDs. SSDs are quite fast, so fast they can easily saturate a 6Gb/s link. So, an iPhone 4S (or any other iPhone) uses a single NAND module. Assume the RAM is topped out, the NAND module can easily take care of the swap because it is so much faster.

You may not even notice a difference (until you have like 10 different apps in background).
 
jav6454 said:
I left out the best part of your post. This is exactly why you don't need a large amount of RAM in your iPhone.

In computers it makes sense because the swap is in the Hard Disk which is by definition, slow. Add to that the slower interface to it. So in a computer having more RAM than needed is always good.

On a smartphone, the main storage is composed of NAND Flash modules, which are the building blocks for SSDs. SSDs are quite fast, so fast they can easily saturate a 6Gb/s link. So, an iPhone 4S (or any other iPhone) uses a single NAND module. Assume the RAM is topped out, the NAND module can easily take care of the swap because it is so much faster.

You may not even notice a difference (until you have like 10 different apps in background).
Click to expand...


You forget that apply only to read speed. Right speed of NAND memory is crap compared to the read speed.

Also both speeds are crap compared to the ram speeds.
 
How much RAM does your digital camera have? How about your television? Do you know or care? Why or why not?

Questions that all Fandroid Fanbots should ask themselves... these people just don't get it, they never will.
 
www.xda-developers.com

This is the place where fandroids should be gloating their specs, not here.

I mean, people there hate on the sensation over Evo because it has 256mb ram less (for a total of 768mb, still impressive) lol. What do you guys expect from them?
 
I also just want to point out... that since pretty much all current iOS devices have 512mb, app makers can optimize their apps for this amount of ram, vs android where there are devices with up to 2gb of ram... some have 1gb... and many have 512gb.

So what do you optimize your app for? 2gb? 1gb? how does that effect the performance of all the users on devices with lesser specs?

The biggest problem Android faces is that there is an ever-increasing number of device tiers and you can't build an app that is great for all of them without optimizing for the lowest common denominator...

Sure, having a dual core phone with 1gb of ram is all well and dandy, but what happens in 6 months when the standard android device is quad core with 2gb?

The developers can go one way or the other, but either you are going to get users complaining that their new quadcore 2gb ram droid isn't any faster than their old one... or users that say their 6 month old dualcore 1gb ram droid is too slow.
 
Juan007 said:
How much RAM does your digital camera have? How about your television? Do you know or care? Why or why not?

Questions that all Fandroid Fanbots should ask themselves... these people just don't get it, they never will.
Click to expand...

fact that you go to that argument tells us all that you have zero understanding what a smart phone is compared to a camara

Followed by the Fandroid throwing around speaks even more volumes.

Digital camaras only need enough memory to hold on to the photo long enough to move it to the memory card. TV only needs enough ram to hold on to what signal it needs to process. IT does not need to house an OS. Nor any information on what the App needs to run.

By your argument desktop and laptop computers need less than a 100 megs of ram. The iPhone has much more in common with a laptop than a camera or a TV.


Amnesia87 said:
I also just want to point out... that since pretty much all current iOS devices have 512mb, app makers can optimize their apps for this amount of ram, vs android where there are devices with up to 2gb of ram... some have 1gb... and many have 512gb.

So what do you optimize your app for? 2gb? 1gb? how does that effect the performance of all the users on devices with lesser specs?

The biggest problem Android faces is that there is an ever-increasing number of device tiers and you can't build an app that is great for all of them without optimizing for the lowest common denominator...

Sure, having a dual core phone with 1gb of ram is all well and dandy, but what happens in 6 months when the standard android device is quad core with 2gb?

The developers can go one way or the other, but either you are going to get users complaining that their new quadcore 2gb ram droid isn't any faster than their old one... or users that say their 6 month old dualcore 1gb ram droid is too slow.
Click to expand...

I am just going to point out to you that all the 512 megs of ram does to app devs is tell them that they have relatively little memory to work with. You can never count on having full access to all the ram. The OS runs on some plus what ever other apps in the back ground. More ram just means you have more bandwidth and memory you have access to.

It is always good practice to try to keep your memory footprint from getting to big but come on your argument is really bad and only a step above the TV argument the other guy made in understanding ram and how it is used.
 
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Rodimus Prime said:
You forget that apply only to read speed. Right speed of NAND memory is crap compared to the read speed.

Also both speeds are crap compared to the ram speeds.
Click to expand...

Who cares about WRITE (that's how that word is spelled) speed for a page file? I'm not sitting there watching a page file get built, it happens in the background and I'm oblivious...

The only time the write speed would be of any consequence would be if you for some reason wanted to keep loading and unloading an app from the page file (or when you are downloading music or installing apps, though this behavior is irrelevant of ram since you aren't going to install apps or store music in ram anyway)

And yes, NAND is substantially slower than RAM, but when you are dealing with ~100mb apps, the perceivable difference in performance is miniscule...

I genuinely don't care if it takes my phone 3 seconds to dump my app from NAND to RAM vs .3 second opening straight from RAM.

I'm sorry... I'm just not so deluded as to think that losing 2 second of my time waiting for a lowly app to load is really a problem. There is nothing I could possibly be doing with my phone that would be so important that 2 whole seconds of lost time will bother me.
 
It is a planned obsolescence strategy. In two years, you'll want to run iOS 7. What if it requires 1GB to handle whatever feature Apple comes up with? I may not need 1GB today but I would like to have it for investment protection.

For example, I love my iPad 1. It does everything I need but the 256MB of RAM is the only limiting factor. I don't need the cameras or the A5 for my purposes but I'm going to upgrade to the iPad 2 just to run iOS 5 and Safari smoothly. If it had 512MB to start with, I wouldn't upgrade.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
fact that you go to that argument tells us all that you have zero understanding what a smart phone is compared to a camara

Followed by the Fandroid throwing around speaks even more volumes.

Digital camaras only need enough memory to hold on to the photo long enough to move it to the memory card. TV only needs enough ram to hold on to what signal it needs to process. IT does not need to house an OS. Nor any information on what the App needs to run.

By your argument desktop and laptop computers need less than a 100 megs of ram. The iPhone has much more in common with a laptop than a camera or a TV.
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No, you missed the point entirely. If you have two digital cameras, same sensor + optics, one does burst capture .2 sec interval, burst length 20 images, the other does .4 sec interval, burst length 15 images, that's a difference worth noting. Because of HW difference (maybe) such as higher DRAM, camera #1 runs burst capture better than camera #2. Burst capture is your application, digital camera is your platform.

Ok now phone is your platform. What's your application that runs better on 1 GB than 512 MB? I'm waiting, please hurry, can't find anything? It sure isn't GUI, my 512 MB platform is light years ahead of your 1 GB platform in that area. But I'm sure your 1 GB platform can run all kinds of great apps that my platform can't like... uh...

Oh but your 1 GB platform is better at starting apps, oh wait no it's not.

The point is, there is exactly ZERO benefit to 1 GB memory on the platform because it does NOTHING for ANY application. Z E R O.
 
im going to wait until we get a real tear down--i remember last year an apple rep said the 4 had 256...
 
So if the 4S has the same amount of RAM as the iPhone 4, why won't Siri be a feature on the iPhone 4?
 
Dmunjal said:
It is a planned obsolescence strategy. In two years, you'll want to run iOS 7. What if it requires 1GB to handle whatever feature Apple comes up with? I may not need 1GB today but I would like to have it for investment protection.

For example, I love my iPad 1. It does everything I need but the 256MB of RAM is the only limiting factor. I don't need the cameras or the A5 for my purposes but I'm going to upgrade to the iPad 2 just to run iOS 5 and Safari smoothly. If it had 512MB to start with, I wouldn't upgrade.
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If they are releasing iOS5 for 3GS (which started with iOS5), I'm fairly certain that iOS 6 and 7 will run on the iPhone 4S... I'm sure iOS 6 will run quite well in fact, and honestly, I don't know about you but I don't give a damn about iOS 7 running on my iPhone 4S, because there is no way I'll still have the same phone in 2years...
 
CK1Czar said:
So if the 4S has the same amount of RAM as the iPhone 4, why won't Siri be a feature on the iPhone 4?
Click to expand...

Because Apple choose to put in a bogus reason to block it.

This is not the first time nor will it be the last time Apple uses some lame reason. We already have seen siri work as an App just fine on the 3GS and I want to say even 3G which tells us that this is pretty much a bogus blocking.
 
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