iPhone 6 to feature (only) 1 GB of RAM?

[Sauron]

For what follows I'm going to assume for a moment that this is true, but honestly it could be just random nonsense.

 

I can already see the hordes of Apple fans claiming that 1gb is the perfect amount of ram and that you don't need any more. They would be probably right to a certain extent, however there's more to it than that.

Apple sells the iphone as the best that they could produce and they promise outstanding quality, power, functionality etc and thus justify a price that is out of this world. To all Apple fans out there, ask yourself, is 1gb of ram really the best Apple could possibly stick in their phone for 730$? Is a sub-1080p screen acceptable at that price point when lg has a quad hd one in a cheaper phone?

On top of that, let's analize who could be intersted in the powerful cpu and gpu that the iphones offer: people like me and the others on this forum, people who like to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their pocket pcs, people who play doom 3 on their phone as opposed to flappy bird. And Apple negates all of this. They close the system up to the point where the extra power is utterly irrelevant and nobody would notice if instead of a new cpu they still had the one of the iphone 5 in it without benchmarking it. And the irony of it is that people will buy a 730$ phone just to use whatsapp, facebook and flappy bird, which they could do easily on an 80$ one.

So there's my little rant about Apple's business practices and why I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if this rumor where true. It's almost like the geniuses at Apple reason like this: "Ok, we want to sell this phone for xxx$. What's the worst product we can get away with for that price?"

[Kyuubixchidori]

my 2 cents. in a world where everyone is HERPY DERP NEED TO CLOSE EVERY APP EVER OR MY BATTERY WILL GET DESTROYED 512mb would be enough. 

[Victorious Secret]

For what follows I'm going to assume for a moment that this is true, but honestly it could be just random nonsense.

 

I can already see the hordes of Apple fans claiming that 1gb is the perfect amount of ram and that you don't need any more. They would be probably right to a certain extent, however there's more to it than that.

Apple sells the iphone as the best that they could produce and they promise outstanding quality, power, functionality etc and thus justify a price that is out of this world. To all Apple fans out there, ask yourself, is 1gb of ram really the best Apple could possibly stick in their phone for 730$? Is a sub-1080p screen acceptable at that price point when lg has a quad hd one in a cheaper phone?

On top of that, let's analize who could be intersted in the powerful cpu and gpu that the iphones offer: people like me and the others on this forum, people who like to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their pocket pcs, people who play doom 3 on their phone as opposed to flappy bird. And Apple negates all of this. They close the system up to the point where the extra power is utterly irrelevant and nobody would notice if instead of a new cpu they still had the one of the iphone 5 in it without benchmarking it. And the irony of it is that people will buy a 730$ phone just to use whatsapp, facebook and flappy bird, which they could do easily on an 80$ one.

So there's my little rant about Apple's business practices and why I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if this rumor where true. It's almost like the geniuses at Apple reason like this: "Ok, we want to sell this phone for xxx$. What's the worst product we can get away with for that price?"

 

And yet iPhones are some of the best performing devices when they come out, so that blows your entire (flawed) analogy out of the water. 

[Sauron]

And yet iPhones are some of the best performing devices when they come out, so that blows your entire (flawed) analogy out of the water. 

 

Excuse me, which analogy?

They are some of the best performing devices, yes, the problem is that the competitors are priced much lower (in most cases, Samsung is guilty as much as Apple imo) and even if performance is similar the iphone is behind on many levels, like the screen resolution and ram for multitasking. The problem is not the phone itself, it's the price, and the iphone is overpriced to hell. And even though it performs well, guess what, it doesn't matter because you can't actually use that performance. It's only there for benchmarks and to try and justify the absurd price. In no way is an iphone worth 730$, not to mention that they ask 110$ to double your storage which anyone should agree is bullshit.

 

Look at something like the nexus 5. 1080p screen, 2gb of ram, extremely close performance to the iphone, at less than half the price. And no, 100 grams of aluminium don't cost 350$, sorry. My bike is 20kg of aluminium and was half that price.

[Victorious Secret]

Excuse me, which analogy?

They are some of the best performing devices, yes, the problem is that the competitors are priced much lower (in most cases, Samsung is guilty as much as Apple imo) and even if performance is similar the iphone is behind on many levels, like the screen resolution and ram for multitasking. The problem is not the phone itself, it's the price, and the iphone is overpriced to hell. And even though it performs well, guess what, it doesn't matter because you can't actually use that performance. It's only there for benchmarks and to try and justify the absurd price. In no way is an iphone worth 730$, not to mention that they ask 110$ to double your storage which anyone should agree is bullshit.

 

Look at something like the nexus 5. 1080p screen, 2gb of ram, extremely close performance to the iphone, at less than half the price. And no, 100 grams of aluminium don't cost 350$, sorry. My bike is 20kg of aluminium and was half that price.

 

Apple will charge what the market will allow, and clearly the market allows a phone to start at 700 off contract. But who buys them off contract exactly? Very few compared to the larger amounts who get heavily subsidized devices from carriers. 

 

You're acting like specs really matter that much. As if you NEED 3GB of RAM, high resolution screens, and everything else, and if a phone doesn't have that it isn't worthy. 

Your bike might be 20kg of aluminum but its not worth much because the market doesn't care its 20kg of aluminum. And I'd call bullshit on your bike being 20kg of aluminum and only costing half of the iPhone. 

[Builder]

Apple will charge what the market will allow, and clearly the market allows a phone to start at 700 off contract. But who buys them off contract exactly? Very few compared to the larger amounts who get heavily subsidized devices from carriers. 

 

You're acting like specs really matter that much. As if you NEED 3GB of RAM, high resolution screens, and everything else, and if a phone doesn't have that it isn't worthy. 

Your bike might be 20kg of aluminum but its not worth much because the market doesn't care its 20kg of aluminum. And I'd call bullshit on your bike being 20kg of aluminum and only costing half of the iPhone. 

20kg? Holy shit...his bike weighs 40 pounds?

 

Apple's whole strategy is designing products so that specs aren't what make or break the device. It's about design. When specs are all that matters, markets get commoditized. Commoditized markets are sad, sad places.

[flibberdipper]

At least in the iOS environment, pretty much all of the devices are created equal in terms of RAM, so it shouldn't really be a problem. It's not like Android where the lower-end phones come with 512MB, and the flagship phones come with 2GB or more. That's a HUGE range for devs to try and cover to make all of their apps work as well as possible.

[Sauron]

Apple will charge what the market will allow, and clearly the market allows a phone to start at 700 off contract. But who buys them off contract exactly? Very few compared to the larger amounts who get heavily subsidized devices from carriers. 

 

You're acting like specs really matter that much. As if you NEED 3GB of RAM, high resolution screens, and everything else, and if a phone doesn't have that it isn't worthy. 

Your bike might be 20kg of aluminum but its not worth much because the market doesn't care its 20kg of aluminum. And I'd call bullshit on your bike being 20kg of aluminum and only costing half of the iPhone. 

 

Oh, my bike is 20kg (more or less, I never cared to weigh it but I can pick it up with one arm so it can't be much more) of aluminium and it was 200 euros. What I meant is, "100 grams of aluminium aren't worth 350$ (referring to the fact that the shroud of the iphone is aluminium as opposed to the plastic on the nexus 5) and my bike was about half as much even though it's 20kg of aluminium".

 

You're basically agreeing with me here: I said that Apple tries to get away with as little as possible for a given price and you're saying they can do so because people will buy it. That doesn't make it any better, considering the competition makes the aforementioned nexus 5.

 

Again, I agree that you more than likely don't need 3gb of ram, that's fine, but not having them and charging more than those who do is unacceptable. If they told me "ok, you don't need that much stuff so we'll make our phone without it and it will cost 250$ thanks to the money we spared" I'd be more than fine with it and would probably end up buying it, too. If I don't need more than 1gb of ram, why should I buy an iphone as opposed to the huawei ascend g700 for 180 bucks? It's not like I can actually use the extra power of the iphone's chip because Apple won't let me, the huawei would be equally as smooth or smooth enough that in everyday use I can't tell the difference. Hell, even the g700 has 2gb of ram, and it's a fourth of the price of the iphone.

 

tl:dr, specs matter only if you charge an absurd price and excuse it with better specs when you don't actually have them.

[AlTech]

Source: http://www.gforgames.com/gadgets/iphone-6-will-feature-1gb-ram-44826/

My 2 cents:

Considering, that the 5s also comes with 1GB and given, that this rumor is true, i can only see a improvement of the TouchID, inclusion of NFC and a possibly better Display as well as the A8-Chip to be a reason to step up to the new 6-Model.

If however the A8 is not making up for this possible lack of RAM, we might see some issues regarding performance, if the higher display-resolution (rumored to be quad-HD/2K) is a thing, because the memory will most likely be shared between CPU and GPU within the A8-chip.

The 4.7" screen will be 1704x ____ and the 5" 1920x1080 not more.

A8 chip will need 2GBs. The 5s is good for now but will struggle with 64 Bit Apps due to the lack of 2GBs or more present considering the amount of ram 64 bit apps need (1.5x more than 32 bit).

EDIT: The GPU will need a shared 128 Bit memory bus. On the 5s it is starved of bandwidth. (64 bit memory bus)

[AlTech]

Oh, my bike is 20kg (more or less, I never cared to weigh it but I can pick it up with one arm so it can't be much more) of aluminium and it was 200 euros. What I meant is, "100 grams of aluminium aren't worth 350$ (referring to the fact that the shroud of the iphone is aluminium as opposed to the plastic on the nexus 5) and my bike was about half as much even though it's 20kg of aluminium".

You're basically agreeing with me here: I said that Apple tries to get away with as little as possible for a given price and you're saying they can do so because people will buy it. That doesn't make it any better, considering the competition makes the aforementioned nexus 5.

Again, I agree that you more than likely don't need 3gb of ram, that's fine, but not having them and charging more than those who do is unacceptable. If they told me "ok, you don't need that much stuff so we'll make our phone without it and it will cost 250$ thanks to the money we spared" I'd be more than fine with it and would probably end up buying it, too. If I don't need more than 1gb of ram, why should I buy an iphone as opposed to the huawei ascend g700 for 180 bucks? It's not like I can actually use the extra power of the iphone's chip because Apple won't let me, the huawei would be equally as smooth or smooth enough that in everyday use I can't tell the difference. Hell, even the g700 has 2gb of ram, and it's a fourth of the price of the iphone.

tl:dr, specs matter only if you charge an absurd price and excuse it with better specs when you don't actually have them.

Specs matter. I wouldn't consider a phone without the following

-2GB RAM (stock android) more for UIs like TouchWiz

-1920x1080 IPS panel (but I would love SUPER AMOLED)

-SD Card slot (unless it has a nice price for the 32GB model)

Snapdragon 800 or better

[ZacDaMan72]

Y'all know how amazing iOS optimisation is right? An iPhone 4S runs fine on iOS 7... My iPhone 4 only lags with the keyboard as in the the sound and the letter pop-ups take maybe 1/2 a second to happen.

[AlTech]

It would be pretty fantastic... and it's the sort of thing Apple would do.

They have done Quad channel 32 bit in the past (ipad 4/ ipad with retina display (and lightning connector) )

Written on my ipad 4

[Sauron]

Specs matter. I wouldn't consider a phone without the following

-2GB RAM (stock android) more for UIs like TouchWiz

-1920x1080 IPS panel (but I would love SUPER AMOLED)

-SD Card slot (unless it has a nice price for the 32GB model)

Snapdragon 800 or better

 

Sure, I meant that there's nothing wrong with a phone with lower specs as long as the price is fair, simply because not everyone is willing to spend 350+$ on one.

[LukeTim]

Specs matter. I wouldn't consider a phone without the following

-2GB RAM (stock android) more for UIs like TouchWiz

-1920x1080 IPS panel (but I would love SUPER AMOLED)

-SD Card slot (unless it has a nice price for the 32GB model)

Snapdragon 800 or better

 

Specs matter to you.

[LukeTim]

People get hung up on the 4GB+ RAM thing because it's simply the most obvious and visible example of a benefit for 64-bit computing.

 

It's not even an architecural advantage... It's just that many 32-bit versions of OSes never bothered to use PAE properly. 32-bit Windows could have addressed more RAM if Microsoft saw fit to include it.

 

That's how I understand it, anyway.

[dalekphalm]

The 4.7" screen will be 1704x ____ and the 5" 1920x1080 not more.

A8 chip will need 2GBs. The 5s is good for now but will struggle with 64 Bit Apps due to the lack of 2GBs or more present considering the amount of ram 64 bit apps need (1.5x more than 32 bit).

EDIT: The GPU will need a shared 128 Bit memory bus. On the 5s it is starved of bandwidth. (64 bit memory bus)

Source for that please? I'm not necessarily disputing your claim, but you're stating it as a hard fact, so it would be best for the discussion if you could link an article or page that supports this statement.

[dalekphalm]

It's not even an architecural advantage... It's just that many 32-bit versions of OSes never bothered to use PAE properly. 32-bit Windows could have addressed more RAM if Microsoft saw fit to include it.

 

That's how I understand it, anyway.

You're 100% correct. 64-bit can natively address 4GB+ of RAM, but with PAE, 32-bit Windows could do it for years. Case in point, the 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 could support up to 64GB on the Enterprise and Data Center Editions (Standard Edition was artificially limited to 4GB so that people would opt for the 64-bit version which could support 32GB on the Standard Edition).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Editions

[AlTech]

It's not even an architecural advantage... It's just that many 32-bit versions of OSes never bothered to use PAE properly. 32-bit Windows could have addressed more RAM if Microsoft saw fit to include it.

 

That's how I understand it, anyway.

Microsoft wanted you to buy 64 Bit version to support more ram

PAE can be used to support more ram on OS 10.4 or so

[AlTech]

Yes, iOS memory allocation works in a way that using virtual memory is very seamless. This is their philosophy behind not having more DDR3L . They use the flash storage instead if really needed. Also, android is a memory hog compared to iOS.

Incorrect ios does not page to eMMC.

[AlTech]

Source for that please? I'm not necessarily disputing your claim, but you're stating it as a hard fact, so it would be best for the discussion if you could link an article or page that supports this statement.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/9

[steffen_anywhere]

Incorrect ios does not page to eMMC.

 

Well, I don't know, but I've heard this from a few ios developers, how do you know. I don't have personal experience in iOS development, so this could've been wrong as `i just heard this from someone else, who I thought was quite credible.

[LAwLz]

At least in the iOS environment, pretty much all of the devices are created equal in terms of RAM, so it shouldn't really be a problem. It's not like Android where the lower-end phones come with 512MB, and the flagship phones come with 2GB or more. That's a HUGE range for devs to try and cover to make all of their apps work as well as possible.

Memory is already a huge issue on iOS. It crashes all the time. Even Anand which really likes Apple said that his Retina iPad Mini crashes at least once a week because it runs out of memory, and when it's at its worst it crashes several times a day.

If they increase the resolution then they will probably have to increase the RAM dedicated to the GPU, which will cause even bigger memory issues.

 

 

Source for that please? I'm not necessarily disputing your claim, but you're stating it as a hard fact, so it would be best for the discussion if you could link an article or page that supports this statement.

All the pointers are bigger. Depending on how many variables and pointers your program uses, it could very easily grow even more than 1.5 times. I think Anand checked a handful of apps and got an average of ~1.5x.

 

 

I have only looked at the last page in this thread but am I correct when I say the other 4 pages are people saying specs doesn't matter (which they totally does) and/or that iOS doesn't need more RAM (which is most certainly does)?

The few times I have used iOS devices they run out of RAM very quickly, or they do like Safari and expunge tabs very quickly so that I have to reload them (because it doesn't want to keep tabs in the very small cache for long).

 

I really hope Apple goes for at least 2GB of RAM. It would really help performance and stability.

[flibberdipper]

Memory is already a huge issue on iOS. It crashes all the time. Even Anand which really likes Apple said that his Retina iPad Mini crashes at least once a week because it runs out of memory, and when it's at its worst it crashes several times a day.

If they increase the resolution then they will probably have to increase the RAM dedicated to the GPU, which will cause even bigger memory issues

Huh. I can honestly say that when I still had my school-issued iPad 2 (yes, 512MB of RAM, I had the latest version of iOS 6 when it was released) I beat it half to death multitasking and only had it crash a couple of times due to low memory.

[LAwLz]

Huh. I can honestly say that when I still had my school-issued iPad 2 (yes, 512MB of RAM, I had the latest version of iOS 6 when it was released) I beat it half to death multitasking and only had it crash a couple of times due to low memory.

Your iPad 2 might not have this issue because the screen isn't that high res (so less RAM needed for the GPU) and it is not running the 64bit version of iOS (which requires more RAM).

[flibberdipper]

Your iPad 2 might not have this issue because the screen isn't that high res (so less RAM needed for the GPU) and it is not running the 64bit version of iOS (which requires more RAM).

You have a valid point.