THe 2021 iPad Pro has 8GB of RAM, or 16GB with the 1TB storage option.

iPad OS 16 also adds virtual memory for the first time on an iOS device.

That's significantly better.

It makes me wonder how much life my 2018 iPad Pro has left. I think it only has 3GB of RAM, which I could see being more important, as Apple adds more multitasking to the OS.

> iPad OS 16 also adds virtual memory for the first time on an iOS device.

I have also seen that claim, but I have a really hard time believing they didn’t have swap before. Like hell, I’m sure they must have used memory compression as well..

As far as I know iOS dealt with memory by ruthlessly ejecting background apps from memory as needed. If your foreground app exceeded memory limits and all background apps had already been freed then your foreground app is killed.

The latter is pretty rare given how much work has been put into notifying apps about memory pressure, making them easily suspend/resume, and not using garbage collection.

Well, in a way it is a form of swap (just a program-controlled one over an automatic), to tell it to save its state because it is gonna be killed. And to be honest, it is a very fair way of working that should be moved to the desktop as well (plenty of apps have no reason to run in the background - though memory eviction is not needed there when ample memory is available).

Also, sorry to be pedantic but reference counting is a garbage collector algorithm, but I do understand what you mean here (RC needs less memory at the price of not being able to defer work to a concurrent thread)