[blinkingled]

Another great review as usual from Anandtech.

Wow, Apple is still skimping on RAM at the expense of user experience. It would've been a great time to bump the RAM up to 2GB given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption. It was already kind of bad on previous gen 32-bit iPads.

It's still tempting to upgrade from the brick that the iPad 3 now feels but I'll live with it until the one with finger print reader, more RAM and fully baked iOS 7.1.x are out.

[tedunangst]

If they ship an ipad with 2GB, developers will start to use 2GB and then apps will run like crap on older models. Then people will complain about forced obsolescence. (Source: the dozens of comments I've read from people complaining their 512MB iOS device has been rendered useless.)

[blinkingled]

Something's gotta give - after sticking to 1GB on 4 generations users would hardly complain about the newer one having more RAM - that's just technological progress. Macs no longer have 2GB RAM for example. Secondly developers would be stupid to use more RAM just because they can - if their app only runs on the latest iPad, I'd say that would be a big issue.

[Tyrannosaurs]

Particularly when the iPad 2 is still a current model. I suspect that's the thing holding them back.

[devcpp]

I don't think so, otherwise we'd still have black and white operating systems, because colors add so much memory usage.

If Apple doesn't let its apps get more intricated, competitors will do it first...

[Tyrannosaurs]

Maybe, but it's the balance of what you can do rather than any individual item on a specification, particularly when you're comparing devices with other different hardware elements running different operating systems.

Plus developers have got the increased power of the 64-bit A7 and the features of the M7 chip to keep themselves entertained so it's not as if Apple are treading water.

Besides do we really want to recreate the "requires a minimum of X Gb RAM to run" small print world of Windows games?

[InclinedPlane]

Either way someone suffers, kind of a silly dichotomy. Especially when modern android smartphones, let alone tablets, have 2GB of RAM.

Also, Apple has the power to mandate that all apps have to run well on whatever old hardware Apple wants to keep supported. There's no good excuse.

[simonh]

Android devices switched up to high ram co figs because they had to. A typical Android device runs a ton of stuff in the background such as Facebook uploaders, sync services, location trackers, carrier services, manufacturer UI shells and crapwear, etc you just don't get on iOS devices. To be fair, a lot of these services can do useful stuff and the freedom to run stuff like that is one of the reasons some people like Android, but the result is a much larger overall memory utilisation.

Apples approach to extending background services was to engineer a 'motion coprocessor' to handle one class of background tasks as efficiently as possible. Samsung et al just saw the memory utilisation on their devices go up from the services they're running so they jacked up the installed memory.

The second consideration is battery life. Memory uses battery power all the time, whether that memory is doing anything useful or not. Apple is fanatical about power conservation. You don't get 10 hour battery life as a standard feature on your mobile devices by accident.

[blinkingled]

Whether to keep background processes and how many to keep is trivially configurable in Android though. So if Samsung wanted to skimp on RAM they could totally do so. My wife's Galaxy Nexus had 1GB RAM and Android 4.3 works fine there but compared to my Note 2 the multi tasking suffers. Anecdotally though I have had much lesser page reloads on Android devices even with 1GB RAM.

So yes Android will use more memory if there is some available but there's no evidence to suggest it needs more than iOS.

[simonh]

So what you're saying is that in your personal experience Android devices with 1GB of RAM suffer in multi-tasking. And yet you also say there's no evidence Android devices need more RAM?

BTW, there's another class of software Android devices run that consume more RAM. UI widgets. Now that's perfectly legitimate. If you like widgets, Android or WP are the way to go. It's just that they have a cost in RAM utilization, and therefore device memory specs and power consumption. If Apple supported UI widgets, they'd have to also increase memory capacity to maintain system performance and stability, so they don't. This is an area where reasonable people can have a difference of opinion. Apple prioritize battery life and lean system design, Android emphasizes features and customization.

[blinkingled]

> So what you're saying is that in your personal experience Android devices with 1GB of RAM suffer in multi-tasking. And yet you also say there's no evidence Android devices need more RAM?

No. I am talking relative here. Relative to my iPad my 1GB Android devices ( N7 (2012) and GNex) reloaded browser pages or lost background audio/video playback noticeably lesser. However on my Note 2 which has 2GB RAM, I very rarely see browser page reloads and don't remember having lost background audio for example at all (something that happens routinely on iPad and sometimes on the N7.)

So what I am saying is that Android devices don't _need_ more than 1GB - anecdotally they offer slightly better multitasking performance for the same 1GB than the iPad. But both on Android and iOS - the experience will get appreciably better with 2GB RAM given how smoother my Note 2 is and given how many times my iPad reloads/loses stuff. (Just check the diagnostics logs for low memory on iOS devices.)

[dzhiurgis]

That's interesting. However I've read that iOS doesn't have built in garbage collector, automatically forcing you to write apps that consume less memory.

[blinkingled]

That's not quite true. Garbage Collector isn't a developer's magical ticket to write careless memory hogs. Android devices have a per app (process really) limit of how much heap memory they can consume. It can be anything in between 32MB to 256MB depending on the device. So developers still have to be very careful to not consume any more memory than absolutely necessary so that their app continues to work on as many devices as possible. Besides frequent GC will pause the app and ruin the experience - so there's that to worry about too.

[Arcanum-XIII]

Why ? It's not because I'm trying to be a nice citizen in the memory part of my app that I use less or more memory. It's the developer choice that will take care of that, and not the way we clear our path.

[devx]

Wouldn't that happen anyway if they do that next year?

[forrestthewoods]

"given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption"

I've not read about this. Can you cite a source?

[throwaway2048]

larger pointers mean more ram is taken up by programs, its something that's a given with a transition from a 32bit to a 64bit architecture.

[joakleaf]

Yeah, pointers are double size, but the majority of RAM for iOS apps is used by images and other resources. These do not grow in size.

Most apps are not using tens of megabytes for pointer based graph-structures etc. or code.

They are however using loads of megabytes for image data, offscreen buffers, etc.

So I doubt that 64-bit changes much.

[sandipc]

Anand mentions it in this article.

[imjoshdean]

I'm not going to hold my breath on the actual RAM number until we see an iFixit teardown. Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if the Air had 2GB and the Mini had 1 GB.

[blinkingled]

From the review -

>The iPad Air, like the iPhone 5s, ships with 1GB of LPDDR3 memory. Apple frowns upon dissection of review samples but I think it’s a safe bet that we’re not talking about a PoP (Package-on-Package) configuration but rather discrete, external DRAM here. It’s also probably a safe bet that even the iPad mini with Retina Display will ship with 1GB of memory as well.

[baddox]

> Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad.

Might that not have also been due to the iPad mini having a non-Retina display? Or does system RAM not matter much for that?

[widdershins]

It matters. You have to hold lots of double resolution images in memory, for example, which obviously eats memory up fast.

[baddox]

I wasn't sure how Retina vs. non-Retina apps behave in memory. Some apps presumably ship both sizes of assets, in which case the OS could load only the smaller ones into memory. But if an app only ships Retina assets, would those go straight into memory, or is the OS clever enough to resize them dynamically and throw that into memory?

[gwright]

It is all about tradeoffs. Memory requires power and so more memory means a shorter battery life.

[blinkingled]

Yes, in this case more RAM is arguably the better trade off. Less need to reload apps and browser tabs, better multitasking performance etc. are good things to have over the 15 min or whatever of battery loss it might take to power on additional 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It's just a vastly better user experience for the common use cases. (Besides there are other tablets with 2GB RAM and they come very close to iPad in terms of battery life so it shouldn't be that big of an issue.)

[gwright]

Its all about tradeoffs. How many customers would benefit from boosts in multi-tasking and tab re-loading vs. longer battery life? Apple is known for its outstanding battery life, does it make sense to step back from that for the benefits that you describe?

[blinkingled]

Whatever number of customers use a browser to browse the Internet using their iPad - they would benefit from the RAM increase. Besides it's not known how much exactly another GB would cost in terms of lost minutes of battery. Probably nothing to sweat about.

But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)

[gwright]

I'm not defending them. Just pointing out that there are tradeoffs associated with the configurations you were advocating.

That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.

[blinkingled]

I got the tradeoff part when you mentioned it the first time - it's just that I am saying more RAM is worth the tradeoff of whatever unknown amount of possibly minuscule loss of battery life. And I don't say this without a reason - several times a day I get annoyed by background audio / airplay getting killed and my browser tabs getting reloaded. So it's not without a valid reason.

Anyway - I think at the very least Apple could shove off power consumption elsewhere in the next round of updates and give us more RAM if that's what it takes.

[nwh]

iOS7 does have memory compression though.

[blinkingled]

Right. But it still seems to be an overall increase of 20-30% for lightest of the use cases.

>In general you’re looking at a 20 - 30% increase in memory footprint when dealing with an all 64-bit environment. At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases. With more apps open, including some doing work in the background, I do see relatively aggressive eviction of apps from memory. The most visible case is when Safari tabs have to be reloaded upon switching to them. Applications being evicted from memory don’t tend to be a huge problem since the A7 can reload them quickly.

[glhaynes]

I've always expected they would start to serialize open tabs to the flash storage to keep from having to reload them from the network. Seems (to me) like that'd be easy to do.

[diroussel]

Yes it would be easy, but the flash in these devices is quite slow compared to an SSD. Also what is the impact on energy usage?

[MikeCapone]

Could you point me to a URL that shows that iOS7 have compressed memory? I couldn't find an official mention of it (maybe I'm searching for it wrong).

[nwh]

There's no official mention, but a few jailbreak developers have specifically talking about its existence. (MuscleNerd and Steffan Esser if my memory serves)

[sarafiq]

I guess it's mavericks not iOS7.