It does save battery to not have a 500MB cached video pre-loaded in the background. You're being unrealistic. You want a computer, not a phone. It's clear you have no idea how iOS works.
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Xcode Confirms 2GB of RAM in iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, 4GB of RAM in iPad Pro
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It does save battery to not have a 500MB cached video pre-loaded in the background. You're being unrealistic. You want a computer, not a phone. It's clear you have no idea how iOS works.
But they'll go into great detail on the CPU and GPU? And the display and the touchscreen. Maybe because RAM isn't a good differentiator vs. the competition?
That depends. If you already have the data in RAM, you should keep it until something else comes along and needs it instead. Say, I leave YouTube, and go to another app that decides it needs a ton of RAM to cache something else. If the data is there, you shouldn't just immediately throw it away.
That said, iOS' approach to clearing caches is a bit brute force at times:
- App allocates RAM.
- If there isn't enough RAM available for predicted future allocations, tell other active apps to "clear up memory".
- If there still isn't enough RAM available, start picking apps that are still running, and tell them to save state and exit. The order should start with the least recently used app, but it is possible this algorithm is not written that way.
The "clear up memory" bit is hazy, because it is up to the individual app to decide how aggressive it should be. But if you aren't aggressive enough, iOS can simply kill your app in the background after telling you to clear up memory a couple times. Oops. And so an app like YouTube probably just throws out any pre-cached video data that it already had when asked to clear memory.
This also works on predictions, since clearing up caches and letting apps save state before they exit is somewhat expensive (100s of milliseconds, potentially), and you don't want to have to wait for your app to try to allocate 5MB with 4MB free before you go do it. Also, heap fragmentation is a problem too. You can waste a fair bit of RAM with it, and trigger these low memory cleanups faster than if you can avoid too much fragmentation of your app's memory space.
Because I can multitask between 5 to 6 apps and have more than 4 or 5 chrome tabs open without any refresh.
What on Earth are you talking about?
If I load up 5 tabs in Safari... and the pages all load, from the cell towers... then they get booted out of RAM and have to reload when I open them, using more battery and data... that saves battery?
If I start watching a video, it will buffer a chunk of it (consuming data and battery). If I have to go to another app for 5 seconds and go back, it then has to rebuffer everything it had because it threw it all away when I left the app. This uses a ton more data and battery -- not to mention fails entirely if you are no longer in cell service.
I can't figure out where you're coming from. Having to reload data that was already there because it got released from memory way too aggressively doesn't save you any battery, it wastes it.
The lack of RAM in the iPhone 6 Plus makes it an even worse experience than the iPad Air (1) which is famous for the Safari tab reloading. It has reached a very annoying level in the recent months - springboard crashing, safari reloading (websites will crash if they're too large, even if you do not switch to other tabs or other apps), even the camera app, yes, the god damn camera when you try to capture a precious moment of a cute kid. I think part of this horrible experience is due to the bugs in iOS 8 which are never truly fixed over the course of the past year esp. after updating to 8.4.1 I constantly have problems in my home's WiFi network. I just can't update apps easily.
The iPhone 6 Plus is the iPad 3 of iPhones.
The iPhone 6 Plus is the iPad 3 of iPhones.
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I agree! It's almost as if they're too embarrassed to talk about it as if it should be more, especially with the prices they charge for these goodies!
You're forgetting that Apple are previously MASTERS at ARM coding and machine architecture ... recall the G1-G5? All based on RISC based cpu's heavily thriving on ARM code, vs the CISC based cpu's of Intel/AMD.
I understand your perspective. I just honestly don't know what people are doing with their phones where they bump into memory constraints like this. My 6 Plus will stutter very occasionally ... like when I have more than so many Safari tabs open (right now I have 17 open). Beyond that, it runs smooth. Yes, page reloads happen which I don't mind: the majority of the time when I'm opening a tab, it's because I want to see if new stuff has popped up. I understand the frustration about losing form data during a reload. I'm so used to browsing defensively so this doesn't bite me.
That said, the attitude many people take where Apple 'screws' them by not putting in more RAM is hyperbole. Up until now, the iPhone has proven to be one of the single most popular phones on the planet and it performs better than most of its competitors. Sure, a bit more memory will help under certain conditions, but more RAM also takes more battery to keep lit up, so that's a consideration Apple has to make: is the extra battery burn worth the benefits more RAM will confer. It seems now the time is right. The suggestions I've been hearing that Apple hasn't been putting in an extra gig of RAM out of greed is silly.
The performance of the phone is still great and there are a lot of people who don't mind the pages reloading. Not every one uses their iPhone in the same manner you or I do.
I think you'll find that meter will look exactly the same with 2 gigs of RAM. Even 4. A lot of OSs will use as much RAM as possible to keep recently used items at the ready. It'll page out low priority stuff when something else demands the RAM. What this ends up looking like is a device that's constantly using all it's memory ... which is really an efficient way to run things. It's why linux boxes often look like they're using all their RAM even when they're not doing much.
Don't put too much stock in those fancy meters.
PS: To the mods ... i really loath this circular picture frame for my icon ... really destroys the essense.
I live on Earth and I am talking about the iPhone. Also, your story is cool, but iOS has NO IDEA how long you're going to be away when you switch apps. So your argument is cool and everything, but mobile OS isn't there yet to do mind reading. Maybe iOS 10?
I don't fully understand,
Didn't the 4S come with 64GB in 2011? And the 6/6+ with 128GB in 2014?
There is no 256GB iPhone in 2015, is there? Unless I am mistaken.
(I do get that there is an insatiable appetite for increased storage space, ram, processors, etc...but in both 2011 and 2014 both those storage spaces were available for users to choose from)
I'd really like my next iPhone to have more than 400 ppi and to be honest I though about this @3x option before the 6 was out, so I was a bit disappointed about this downscaling thing on the Plus.
Hopefully they'll increase pixel density next time, they have plenty of power with the A9 so even if A10 will be designed for save battery life they should have no problem handling higher resolutions.
How do you think the 6s Plus will handle the downscaling both for the first year with iOS 9 and the following iOS 10?
I think he means the ability to use a file system (i.e., finder) without needing iCloud Drive or a third-party solution (e.g., Dropbox, OneDrive).
Well you clearly haven't been following technology. It's coming very soon Vertical Ram stacks that DON'T lose data. Also linear Storage that is RAM and Storage and is faster then current RAM.
I'm not asking for mind reading. Nice strawman.
Where this conversation started is someone mocking the need for more RAM. I made a point that more RAM would reduce the frequency of needlessly dumping data you still need, resulting in more battery and data consumption. Or how about when you lose data you entered in Safari because when you referenced another tab and switched back, it reloaded and lost everything.
More RAM and iOS memory management is definitely a need.
See my post (on this page, even) that discusses how iOS actually throws out caches. It is never a good idea to throw out a cache from RAM unless you need to. But there are reasons why an app can be triggered to throw away expensive caches when it would benefit from not doing so.
It's been "Very Soon(tm)" for a while now. I'll believe it when I see it. And it doesn't affect the devices coming today or the next couple years that will still be based on good ol' DRAM.
You can also use local storage/servers/services on your own network? At least that's what I do when I want speed and privacy without impacting my data cap; of course, I don't get universal syncing of data, backup to cloud, etc, by doing this, but hey, there are trade-offs to everything.
Yup, I do similar. Especially since both Readdle Documents, and Panic's Transmit can pull down files over SFTP, and both offer document extensions to let other apps reach in and grab files. Transmit is especially useful for me since you can pull files over SFTP using the document extension. They just need to fix their action extension which broke with 9.0 (and is still broken in 9.1).
For me, the only sign of greed is the 16GB base model (since 3GS). But they did take away the 32 and bring the 64 to the same price, which in their eyes makes up for it I guess.
The only reason I care about 1GB of RAM is because I feel like this is the first phone where it's lessened my experience. I've owned every iPhone since the release, and this is the first time where I felt like there wasn't enough memory in it. It's very reminiscent of the first iPad release.