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RAM stands for Random Access Memory... RAM is designed to hold the over flow of data that the CPU can process yet. If you have a faster CPU (A7) you don't need the RAM as much. Great example is current Intel icore processors, they do not require 16 and 32gb of ram like the old pentium processors did. you'll be perfectly fine with 4gb ram which is about standard now.

Also keep in mind a resource intense OS will require more RAM, this was true in the old Windows days. now Windows 7 and 8 had can run on as little as 4gb ram without an issue of slow down. Dual core and quad core my sound nice from a tech desktop/notebook mindset but it does not apply to an optimized OS and Processor.

1 gig of RAM is perfectly fine, here is something to think about the new PS4 and Xbox One both have 8gb of RAM, seems little for systems that can do so much right? :)
 
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And yet it still absolutely blows the doors off of those other high end phones even with only half the amount of RAM...

I would beg to differ; iOS app switching is dismal compared to androids.
 
I would beg to differ; iOS app switching is dismal compared to androids.

iOS app switching has been radically improved in iOS 7 (and let's not even get into Android's notorious lag even on new high end devices), besides, I was referring to raw performance. AnandTech's review testing shows that 5s does indeed blow the doors off of any Android phone currently out there by a good margin just as I was saying...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5
 
If you run spotify and perfect browser at the same time with a few tabs open the phone will run out of ram and start to lock up.

If you run infinity blade 2, safari and a few other apps the phone will run out of ram and start to lock up.

This is BS, your phone doesnt start to 'lock up'. If your phone locks up then you have another fault.

So many have no idea what more RAM means. They think it makes everything faster. It doesnt past a certain point.

My 5 with 1GB works fine, performs great and I dont ever have to think about it. How much it has is irrelevant, in true apple style its transparent to the user.
 
Looks like 1 GB (AT). Pathetic and clear move to force people in the future to buy the iphone 6.

I'm sorry, but if you look at the chart in the same AnandTech review, 1GB is perfectectly consistent with Apples historic trend... Or do you say this every year when Apple releases another best selling phone?
 
RAM in an iPhone is what is keeping background apps hibernating.

For example, I'm in tapatalk on my 4S. If I switch to safari and back to tapatalk everything is just how I left it. Now if I switch to the camera app and took a bunch of pictures and switched back to tapatalk it would reload the app from scratch and I'd lose everything I'm doing. This happens to me daily if I'm not very careful.

The iPhone 5 was a VAST improvement with 1 gb of RAM in iOS 6. It was hard for me to make it close apps like the 4S would.

But not in even the Gold Master of iOS 7 I'm noticing the 5 closing apps. And on my 4S it's even worse then ever. I'm going to withhold my judgment until I restore from new however.

I think more RAM would have been I wise idea even on this go around. Future proofing if nothing else. Apps force closing just isn't a good user experience.
 
I am very disappointed its only 1 gb. Imo its time for a bigger phone with a bigger battery.
 
If you run spotify and perfect browser at the same time with a few tabs open the phone will run out of ram and start to lock up.

If you run infinity blade 2, safari and a few other apps the phone will run out of ram and start to lock up.

This is BS, your phone doesnt start to 'lock up'. If your phone locks up then you have another fault.

So many have no idea what more RAM means. They think it makes everything faster. It doesnt past a certain point.

My 5 with 1GB works fine, performs great and I dont ever have to think about it. How much it has is irrelevant, in true apple style its transparent to the user.

Funny you say "have no idea what more RAM means". I do engineering for personal computing devices and have designed and prototyped my own computer components.

More RAM simply prevents page outs on most electronic devices. During extremely heavy page outs the iPhone 5 will start to freeze various functions and freeze user interfaces until it finished the page out. In other words "lock up".

I like to have many tabs open and do a lot of multi tasking and I constantly see the iPhone 5 lock up. I've had Apple run a diagnostic right after I recreated a lock up scenario for them so that they can confirm it was low RAM causing the lock up, and the low RAM warning from the diagnostic was concurrent with the lock ups I was experiencing during heavy usage.

A lot of content stored in RAM is decompressed. Meaning to display a large 2 MB image it may take 50 MB of RAM. Load 20 images and you've used up all your ram.

Load 8 complex web pages on an inefficient but feature rich browser and load 3 maximum quality songs into RAM from a streaming music service and you're going to cause a heavy page out. It's that simple.

The amount of RAM is irrelevant, whether or not you're doing heavy page outs on a regular basis is relevant, and in my experience I do that at least twice a day, not a big deal but still annoying, but just wait until App complexity grows.

The iPhone 5S could have benefited from 2GB of ram.
 
RAM in an iPhone is what is keeping background apps hibernating.

For example, I'm in tapatalk on my 4S. If I switch to safari and back to tapatalk everything is just how I left it. Now if I switch to the camera app and took a bunch of pictures and switched back to tapatalk it would reload the app from scratch and I'd lose everything I'm doing. This happens to me daily if I'm not very careful.

The iPhone 5 was a VAST improvement with 1 gb of RAM in iOS 6. It was hard for me to make it close apps like the 4S would.

But not in even the Gold Master of iOS 7 I'm noticing the 5 closing apps. And on my 4S it's even worse then ever. I'm going to withhold my judgment until I restore from new however.

I think more RAM would have been I wise idea even on this go around. Future proofing if nothing else. Apps force closing just isn't a good user experience.

If Tapatalk was designed well it would hold APIs that save the state of the app. I.e it relaunches where you left off with what you are doing. Take apple pages, it frequenelty shuts down on my iPad, but when it reloads it launches in the exact state I left it.
 
I agree that the iPhone 5 AND the 5c/5s should each have 2GB of DDR3 ram, sure. I'm not even gonna try to argue that point...


But I'd also like to point out again, that the 5s has DDR3 RAM, while the 5/5c have DDR2 RAM


So how much improvement do you guys think we'll be seeing with the DDR3 RAM upgrade?
 
If Tapatalk was designed well it would hold APIs that save the state of the app. I.e it relaunches where you left off with what you are doing. Take apple pages, it frequenelty shuts down on my iPad, but when it reloads it launches in the exact state I left it.

Your missing the point though, It still has to reload. EA did something similar years ago with their games. It would reload your last play state. However, the actual load times for the game were still bad. This is easily solved with more RAM, hence why people are making a big deal about it.
 
Your missing the point though, It still has to reload. EA did something similar years ago with their games. It would reload your last play state. However, the actual load times for the game were still bad. This is easily solved with more RAM, hence why people are making a big deal about it.

No I do agree, and I get the point. But I'm just saying with the right coding its really not as bad as people say it is, especially with a phone like the 5S. Heck I've had to survive the continous reloading of apps on a 4, so I think people will survive on a 5S
 
If you run infinity blade 2, safari and a few other apps the phone will run out of ram and start to lock up.

How many people play games with a browser open and running? Zero need for that.

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I would beg to differ; iOS app switching is dismal compared to androids.

How so? I press the home button on my S4 and pick the app I want to switch to. Same thing I do on my iPad mini.
 
How many people play games with a browser open and running? Zero need for that.

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How so? I press the home button on my S4 and pick the app I want to switch to. Same thing I do on my iPad mini.

You aren't using the browser and a game at the same time. However here's the way iOS works. If you have recently used a browser on your phone and you have recently played a game on your phone these apps will be stored in memory until they are paged out. It's that simple.

How many people use a browser during one part of the day and play games during another part of the day? Hint: that's EVERYONE.
 
I upgraded from Note 2 > Iphone 5 > Lumia 920 and let me tell you, 2GB is only needed in a bloated OS like Android. WP and iOS run very smooth even with 512MB RAM.
 
You aren't using the browser and a game at the same time. However here's the way iOS works. If you have recently used a browser on your phone and you have recently played a game on your phone these apps will be stored in memory until they are paged out. It's that simple.

Although a page out doesn't always incur the same performance hit depending on what work the page out incurs. A page in can be expensive if the page needs to be loaded from flash/disk, as well. But it isn't nearly as expensive if it is being moved from inactive memory, which is the type of page in that a malloc creates.

With page outs, you have the same two types. One that causes a flush of the data to a swap file, and one that does not. iOS has no swap file, and so a page out will always result in a page going to inactive memory without flushing that page to disk (the expensive part).

The real problem with iOS is that it asks each app to "compact" memory usage in order to do the page outs. That's somewhat expensive, especially when apps don't keep their caches under control before the "do it now!" order arrives, or worse, flush data out to disk when it happens. The more logic 3rd party apps put into their compact routines, the worse the behavior will be. But a page out isn't automatically bad, only when it can't be simply deallocated and requires data to be written out to disk, or triggers some other inefficient routines trying to make room.
 
This is my only real gripe. I was really hoping for 2GB just to feel more secure in getting 3 years out of the 5S. I'll be upgrading either way as an upgrade of my iPhone 4 is long over due.
 
If it only has 1GB RAM it could be a deal breaker for me.

The iOS takes a huge chunk of that 1GB RAM, load Safari and 3-4 tabs loaded with complex websites and your out of RAM and things start paging.

Try doing simple video editing using an app - lets see how "1GB RAM is plenty" is going to get you. Things start getting very sluggish fast.

Guess ill wait next year for a more complete phone.
 
LOL the majority of buyers don't care about ram, hell most don't even know what ram is.

That's because the majority of the populace is ignorant as Hell.

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I upgraded from Note 2 > Iphone 5 > Lumia 920 and let me tell you, 2GB is only needed in a bloated OS like Android. WP and iOS run very smooth even with 512MB RAM.


Your logic suggests we should subtract RAM. Maybe we should just use 128mb :rolleyes:
 
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RAM stands for Random Access Memory... RAM is designed to hold the over flow of data that the CPU can process yet. If you have a faster CPU (A7) you don't need the RAM as much. Great example is current Intel icore processors, they do not require 16 and 32gb of ram like the old pentium processors did. you'll be perfectly fine with 4gb ram which is about standard now.

Also keep in mind a resource intense OS will require more RAM, this was true in the old Windows days. now Windows 7 and 8 had can run on as little as 4gb ram without an issue of slow down. Dual core and quad core my sound nice from a tech desktop/notebook mindset but it does not apply to an optimized OS and Processor.

1 gig of RAM is perfectly fine, here is something to think about the new PS4 and Xbox One both have 8gb of RAM, seems little for systems that can do so much right? :)

That is not how RAM works.

If you are talking about a pentium 4 it does not even support 32 GB of RAM let alone require it. Having a faster CPU is not really going to help. If the RAM is full, data gets written to the HDD. Adding a SSD would help if RAM limited vs HDD (but would still suck) but increasing the CPU speed is not going to help much as the data must be read from disk when RAM is exceeded and that speed is completely dependant on the speed of the disk.
 
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