Questions about iPad Air Ram

[EddyBolt]

Hi guys,

My Question is The iPad Air has the same ram as the iPad 4. I wonder how can it be faster than its predecessors (iPad 2, the new iPad, iPad 4)? I currently own an iPad 2 and my bigger bro has an iPad Air. Comparing the two, I could notice a significant difference in speed of the devices. By a total contrast, while I was going through posts about Macbook pro upgrade options. I got so many recommends toward upgrading the Ram not the CPU of the Macbook. Therefore, I'm kind of confused here. Is it the Ram that make the device runs faster or is it the CPU doing the the job (as I already knew that the iPad Air use the A7 chipset)

Regardless, have any of you guys noticed that every time a new Apple product came out, the previous product starts getting slow and laggy? Is this some kind of marketing trick or something else? I'm really curious about this, plz help me understand. Thanks ^_^!

 

[Night Spring]

Basically, CPU and RAM both affect speed. So if you switch to a faster CPU, like Apple did with iPad 4 to the Air, of course the Air is going to be faster, even though it has the same amount of RAM as the iPad 4. However, if it was possible to add more RAM to the 4, like say, you had an iPad 4 with 4 GB of RAM, vs an Air with only 1 GB, which would be faster? That is the kind of arguments you are seeing with the MacBooks. And sometimes, the answer is that a slower CPU with more RAM is faster, depending on what you are using it for.

As for why older machines seem more sluggish, some of it is psychological, like once you see a faster device, the older one feels slower, even though it is the same exact speed as before. But sometimes, updated apps take up more system resources than previous versions, so they do actually run slower. So I think it's a bit of both.