If Apple doesn't let its apps get more intricated, competitors will do it first...
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?
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.
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.
So yes Android will use more memory if there is some available but there's no evidence to suggest it needs more than iOS.
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.
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.)
I've not read about this. Can you cite a source?
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.
>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.
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?
But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)
That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.
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.
You are suggesting that the configuration that is best for you is best for everyone and therefore is the best for Apple. But that isn't necessarily true. I don't doubt that it would be the best for you -- that is what you want. But don't assume that your preference is best for everyone or for Apple itself.
It is the nature of tradeoffs that you can't satisfy everyone 100% with a single configuration or even several configurations.
You think that additional memory is the better tradeoff. OK, some quick googling shows 1GB of DDR3 memory might be about $10 wholesale (I found $16 retail). So if you are going to sell 70 million tablets (that is the number of iPads sold in the past year), going from 1Gb to 2Gb is roughly a $700 million decision (per/year) and that assumes stable memory prices (they aren't) so your decision might cost more than that (or less). And you've now cut into your power budget for all future products.
As a user I don't have to care what Apple has to do to get the RAM up - renegotiate with their vendors, improve battery life, sell a different SKU with more RAM and $16 more in price, eat up the cost as a price to pay for user experience etc. You kept explaining why they couldn't do it when others have been there and done that.
Frankly even viewed 100% from Apple's standpoint, none of your arguments are very convincing, especially so if you look at what actually is involved in 1GB of additional RAM and when even lower priced devices have it.
I never said that Apple couldn't put in the extra memory -- I just suggested that there were tradeoffs that suggest why they might not have made that choice. I was trying to add information to the discussion but you seem to want to insist on proving your preference is the right one and that Apple made a mistake (as in the wrong decision for Apple and its customers -- even ones who don't have the same needs as yourself).
Note, I'm not trying to prove that Apple made the right choice -- perhaps it was the wrong one and they could have sold more iPads and had happier customers if they added more memory if they had followed your advice. Maybe they wanted to but couldn't line up sufficient supplies or maybe there wasn't space for the extra memory or maybe they didn't want to eat into their profit margin or …
>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.
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.