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Micron's LPDDR4 RAM May Improve Battery Life in Apple's 2014 Products
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As others have pointed out, we are rapidly approaching the limit of how thin a phone can be and still support a camera with a decent lens, unless the lens is detachable, which makes using the camera much less convenient, or mounted on the top or side of the phone, which would be an ergonomic and framing nightmare. We could, however, see a shape that is tapered, like the iMac and the MBP. Maybe even a bit thicker at the top to support a better lens, very much like the shape of the current iMac. Of course, tapering it would have the undesirable effect of reducing the volume available for the battery.
Sure it does. If the memory is 2x faster for the same power consumption and the end result is code can run faster, your new device can complete the work faster. Therefore it gets to go to sleep faster which saves a lot of battery. The biggest battery life improvements over the last fee years have all been because of improving the 'race to sleep'.
Now if your decide has to run flat out doing scientific calculations or playing a complex game, the battery life will suck no matter what
Remember these are the first ever 64-bit iOS devices for Apple and the first-ever 64-bit implementation in iOS. iOS 7's 64-bit libraries were just raw and the craptasic 64-bit Safari's UIWebView was badly written that caused many of those apps with UIWebView browsers to crash including Mobile Safari.
iOS 7.1 was the followup release to improve the libraries. If anything, iOS 8 should greatly improve on this as they continue to optimize for 64-bit.
I'm in the optimistic mood right now. I believe iOS 7 was just a rushed release while the core teams at Apple was still getting used to being under Ive and Federighi.
iOS 7.1 shows they're finally on the right track. I truly believe iOS 8 is going to be the first true release that's feels like a solid one by a coherent Apple, at least I'm hoping so.
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Sure it does. If the memory is 2x faster for the same power consumption and the end result is code can run faster, your new device can complete the work faster. Therefore it gets to go to sleep faster which saves a lot of battery. The biggest battery life improvements over the last fee years have all been because of improving the 'race to sleep'.
Now if your decide has to run flat out doing scientific calculations or playing a complex game, the battery life will suck no matter what
Correct. This isn't true just for the memory chips but just about every single electronic component there is.
The sooner you can push the electronics to idle levels, the less power it needs to consume.
That's why one of the major improvements Apple made to Mavericks were Timer Coalescing. This is a huge benefit for the battery life. Instead of waking up the CPU at any random time to do some code, it groups and schedules all of the tasks into clusters of code to run. This push the CPU to the idle level more often and it stays there longer.
This did actually improve the battery life on almost all Macs.
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While it's true that current apps aren't taxing the A7, there is something to be said for paying to get the cutting edge for future proofing. In 2-3 years that extra overhead of the A7 will make a difference, possibly even allowing the phone to last an extra OS cycle. I got the 4S right when it came out when I was debating going with the 4. While the 4 can technically still run iOS7, it's very slow compared to the 4S, and missing some iOS 7 features, whereas I feel the 4S still holds up fairly well (I'm still using it, waiting on the iPhone 6).
Interestingly, many people state iOS7 (even iOS7.0.x!) is significantly worse on "legacy" 32-bit devices than iOS 6.1.x WRT RAM usage.
In my practice, who have thoroughly compared the RAM needs of the two OS'es after booting in (I'm not comparing UIWebView and the like), the free (the maximum memory one can alloc from his/her app) RAM was pretty much the same. (Tests made on an iPad 3.)
This means I don't think iOS8 will be significantly more resource/RAM-hungry. Apple is, regrettably, highly unlikely to add for example windowed or at least divided-pane multitasking, which would require a lot more RAM. Simple and evolutionary API / feature additions, like the new ones introduced in iOS7, won't warrant significantly more RAM usage.
all apple will do is use this as an excuse to make batteries smaller, so the device can be smaller and lighter, and keep the already appalling battery life around the same as it is now .
I think at 2GB, there will be some additional features added to iOS 8 to take advantage of it.
It's actually comical that the weight and thinness of these phones is so scrutinized when they're so small no matter what. I think this is the problem with why Apple has been so unrelenting on keeping screen size puny. I think I remember Tim Cook, when questioned about bigger screen sizes, saying something about how they were trying to get a larger screen into a form factor they liked or something. Basically saying he thought bigger screen would require too much battery and make the phone too heavy.
Steve Jobs was super hellbent on making things thinner and lighter, and for good reason. I still have an iPhone 3GS and that thing is a boat anchor, but when a Galaxy S4 with a 5" screen weighs 130 grams vs the iPhone 3GS that weighed 140 grams, I'm really not sure what the problem with increasing the screen size has been.
Battery life on the other hand is crucial when you consider these are most people's only communication/navigation device. I moved to a pretty big city about 6 months ago and sometimes when I'm in some random part of town I feel a little anxiety that my phone battery is going to die and leave me without navigation to get home so I have to really start being conservative with my phone. Luckily I usually carry an extra battery around for my Galaxy S4 and then I don't have to worry.
Steve Jobs was super hellbent on making things thinner and lighter, and for good reason. I still have an iPhone 3GS and that thing is a boat anchor, but when a Galaxy S4 with a 5" screen weighs 130 grams vs the iPhone 3GS that weighed 140 grams, I'm really not sure what the problem with increasing the screen size has been.
Battery life on the other hand is crucial when you consider these are most people's only communication/navigation device. I moved to a pretty big city about 6 months ago and sometimes when I'm in some random part of town I feel a little anxiety that my phone battery is going to die and leave me without navigation to get home so I have to really start being conservative with my phone. Luckily I usually carry an extra battery around for my Galaxy S4 and then I don't have to worry.
Battery life......
is paramount in mobile devices. Any that Apple can do for making it better will sthregthen the offers Apple put to the consumers.....
is paramount in mobile devices. Any that Apple can do for making it better will sthregthen the offers Apple put to the consumers.....
I could handle a wedge the shape of a MacBook Air: thick at one end (where the camera is) and very tapered at the other. Somehow they managed to work out that weird shape for the battery in the MBA...
They could even go thicker for a super camera! The problem is a iPhone needs to work tall and sideways so thicker at an end makes it weird for landscape mode...
Gary
I agree that iOS 7 was rushed. I know it would have been embarrassing for Apple if they couldn't deliver iOS 7 with the release of the 5s, but sometimes it's better to delay rather than releasing something half-baked. We would've all survived the Sept. 2013 release of 6.5 with a delayed 7.0 release. I just hope 8.0 is as stable as 6.0/5.0.
You probably would know.
Sarcasm...
Sarcasm is pathetic and lacks personality. Try harder not to stoop so low to form a comment.
Perhaps this will be the path to 2-4GB with longer battery life.
In any case, the plausibility of the rumor regarding the mystery payment shows why Apple needs to hang on to some serious cash.
In any case, the plausibility of the rumor regarding the mystery payment shows why Apple needs to hang on to some serious cash.
Software engineering is not that simple, sticking with older software on a brand new hardware wouldn't prevent this. Remember what we're talking about here, ARMv8 64-bit architecture was entirely new to iOS. Sticking to iOS 6.5 wouldn't prevent the crashes and memory leaks.
In addition, staying with 32-bit CPU and releasing iOS 7 would've been better but it wouldn't prevent the same thing from happening in iOS 8 when they do decide to release 64-bit devices.
Software optimization on a brand new hardware takes an enormous amount of engineering resources, both software and hardware teams have to be involved at the same time.
Heck, it took them 2 years (Mountain Lion and Mavericks) to get it caught up with the hardware in rMBPs. You should've seen the stuttering issues on Lion, horrific. Mavericks have finally resolved almost all of the issues there, especially with better performance on scaled resolutions.
The only true solution is to slow things down and not be pressured by the competition and sticking to the annual releases. However, this is difficult to do when you can't rely on beta teams with no 64-bit devices to test your software with.
Delaying iOS 7 would have delayed iPhone 5S, something that Apple can not risk with the 2 year contracts expiring from the iPhone 4+ owners. They need to get it out to get it in as many people as they can. The competition is very intense right now.
In fact, there were memory leaks in iOS 6 as well (think tabs reloading situation), it just wasn't as bad as the 64-bit type of leaks. It's worse because some of those 64-bit apps are using 30% more memory than before, assuming they're optimized for it. I know not all apps take up more memory but I'd imagine Safari does as Anandtech saw in their analysis.
Where's the foundation for this pre-emptative concern? Noone's even seen the WWDC keynote yet, let alone installed the Beta... hang fire, all will end well