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The iPhone 4S Appears to Have 512MB RAM

If it's only 512MB, that's incredibly stingy on Apple's part.

I don't understand why the iPhone 4S is the price that it is. When you consider how much R&D and how many top notch components went into the iPhone 4 when it was released, the iPhone 4S should be A LOT cheaper. It uses the same manufacturing processes, required very little R&D by comparison, and component prices have all dropped since a year ago.

RAM is cheaper and more plentiful and flash memory has greatly fallen in price as well, and yet Apple is still charging the same amount for the 4S as it did for the 4.

The profit margins on this phone must be astronomical.
 
gkpm said:
The RAM used in these phones is not like your PC RAM.

This one actually comes inside the A5 CPU package itself and is very low power and fast. It's also much more expensive than your typical RAM stick.
Click to expand...
Fast? Are you for real? Its a low-clocked LPDDR2 with a typical memcpy performance of 1-2 GB/s which is 10 times slower than a sandy bridge desktop.

Also, it is NOT more expensive than your typical RAM stick.

The reason they used it in the iPhone 4S is that they had millions of these chips laying around once the TSMC production ramped up and caught up with Ipad2 production.
 
lucidmedia said:
As a developer who works with HTML5 canvas, I was hoping for a performance improvement over the iPad2. Sadly, in this context the iPad does not "work great" at all, its performance is quite terrible.
Click to expand...

Works fine for me. What are you trying to do that you can't achieve? I'd guess it's more an issue with code optimization, rather than blaming the tool. If you can't get it done in 512MB, it's not the iPhone, it's you.
 
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byke said:
As I have said before, I believe the RAM is limeted to help prolong battery performance.
Click to expand...

This.
 
Relativistic said:
Fast? Are you for real? Its a low-clocked LPDDR2 with a typical memcpy performance of 1-2 GB/s which is 10 times slower than a sandy bridge desktop.

Also, it is NOT more expensive than your typical RAM stick.

The reason they used it in the iPhone 4S is that they had millions of these chips laying around once the TSMC production ramped up and caught up with Ipad2 production.
Click to expand...

Maybe just maybe Apple decided to use the A5 because the A6 is not quite ready yet.
 
My guess is that there is an iPhone 4S with 1GB of RAM somewhere in a lab in Cupertino and the powers that be decided it didn't offer a significant improvement in the user experience over the unit with 512MB of RAM based on today's version of iOS 5 and a wide selection of typical apps used (including Safari, photo apps, video apps, games, Siri, etc.).
 
While ultimately, the 4S may run perfectly fine with 512MB, this does make a difference as to how much a speed increase it is from a iPhone 4.

RAM doubled in the 3GS vs the 3G (256MB vs 128MB) and that made a huge difference (CPU increase wasn't the only thing that helped performance). For example, in the web browser, more of a web page could be cached in RAM, allowing for less re-rendering as you scroll around a page.

Maybe 512MB is good enough for the current crop of apps, and the processor improvements will be enough to make a noticeable difference. But you can't argue the 1GB of RAM could lead to better performance than 512MB.

I guess we will see when when people start receiving their 4S's what the performance increase is over the 4.
 
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cvaldes said:
My guess is that there is an iPhone 4S with 1GB of RAM somewhere in a lab in Cupertino and the powers that be decided it didn't offer a significant improvement in the user experience over the unit with 512MB of RAM based on today's version of iOS 5 and a wide selection of typical apps used (including Safari, photo apps, video apps, games, Siri, etc.).
Click to expand...

You are likely correct. But please don't bring logic into the conversation. This is clearly a conspiracy to get you to buy a new phone.
 
I would imagine there is some memory set aside for internal operations such as speech recognition. It may be there is another 512 set aside that cannot be accessed through 3rd party apps. That would make more sense anyway since increasing the memory accessible to 3rd party apps would lead to further reduced compatibility of apps with other iOS devices. Unless any of these claims are said to have been deduced via teardown.
 
Look, I have had my HTC Evo 4G for 1.5 years. It has always had 512MB of RAM, something I was impressed with when I heard the announcement back in April of 2010.

While it sounds good on paper, I cannot say that my phone actually handles multitasking well. My phone is fully rooted running a sold custom ROM, over clocked CPU and a fully manual customized App/RAM management software for rooted users.

Boasting about this to iPhone users would give me the appearance of having the upper hand, but in reality, my phone just doesn't work the way I want it to. Using multiple iPhone 4's, I have come to realize it's simply iOS that makes things run like butter, not the hardware.

I am getting my iPhone 4s on friday and even though it would be nice if it had a 1GB RAM (just so my friend with his bionic won't bother me for a year) I am more than happy to get the most all-around solid phone on the market.
 
heyyoudvd said:
I don't understand why the iPhone 4S is the price that it is.
Click to expand...

Price has nothing, zip, zero, nada, to do with cost. (Except when the cost is so high the company goes bankrupt, which is most certainly not true in Apple's case.) Price is set by the competitive market.

The competitions high-end price point is equally high, and the 4S is out-selling all of the competition's high-end devices. Why should a company take a lower profit if it is selling every one it can make, as well as beating any other product sold by the competition, plus winning the brand awareness wars?
 
lilo777 said:
It does. Just not as good as on modern phones.
Click to expand...

Yes, you have proved without a shadow of a doubt that you are a Anti-Apple hater. When I speak about an Android devices and iPhones I speak from experience using the devices every day. What about you with Apple iPhones?
 
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512 it's perfect there some android phones that have one gig and they suck on iPhone 512 makes it run smooth and super fast
 
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I bet the iPhone will run better that one gig and faster
 
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if it had 512 of ram then why apple dint put suri on 4 it haves 1 g
 
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