- The actual RAM free for app use is less than what yo have in a 3GS.
- The 3GS has less free RAM than an iPod Touch.
- The screen on the iPad has far more pixels to manage or light up, this means grapical items take up far more RAM. So each png jpg or whatever has to be much larger.
- There are numerous reports already on performance regressions with Safari where it constantly reloads tabs when switched to.
- A new iPhone OS upgrade is not far off and it will very likely use more resources on the machine. So you are starting out memory constrained and will have to upgrade to a new OS soon that uses more RAM.
- The larger screen implies apps with more controls and other widgets, these all require RAM to implement. So what you have is programs using more memory than they would if designed for a smaller screen.
- The lack of RAM makes it difficult to implement programs that depend upon lots of RAM. Image editors, HDR tools and other things related to photographic image manipulation come to mind. The lack of RAM however limits many other potential apps on the device.
- People gave already reported out of memory issues.
- Applications only have a little over 110MB of RAM available to them. While many apps can be easily fit into that RAM it isn't much at all for a modern computer. As already mentioned many programs will have a hardtime with the memory limitations.
It is very disappointing because of the sleazy way Apple handled this issue. They left out this critical aspect of the iPads spec in the public information available before sale. This may not be criminal but it certainly isn't ethical.
Actually who cares? It is a bigger problem that Apple seems to be getting away with what seems to be very un ethical behaviour even if it isn't technically illegal.
In any event yes it causes real world problems for users. It effectively lowers performance and drives up bandwidth usage.
That is a gross insult to normal users. Basically you are saying normal users should take whatever Apple shoves down their collective throats and keep quite. Sad, very sad. Using your logic 128MB of RAM should be good enough for everybody.
Dave