Exactly how much does it affect battery life? I wouldn't be at all surprised if the answer is "a lot". I'm sure engineers at Apple would love to be able to provide 2GB of RAM (after all, they're using this device too!), but the fact that they're not either means it is cost-prohibitive (unlikely) or has an unacceptable impact on battery.

I asked someone I know about this and they confirmed that a RAM upgrade would have a significant effect on battery life. Can't provide any citations of course.

They also pointed out that iOS already artificially limits the amount of RAM a single process can use, so adding RAM wouldn't even really do anything besides make it take longer for background apps to be evicted.

Samsung has managed to do it and still maintains (arguably) reasonable battery life. I like Apple products in general, but the whole overpriced/underpowered thing gets a little old.

> I like Apple products in general, but the whole overpriced/underpowered thing gets a little old.

Funny, I'd say the same thing about the people who've been repeating the "overpriced/underpowered" trope ever since it stopped being true over a decade ago.

So you're OK with Safari crashing and other issues due to lack of RAM?

I don't know what you're doing, but I can't recall the last time I ever had Safari crash on me on iOS.

I still have an iPhone 4 and don't have Safari crashing issues.

For what do you need the additional 1GB of RAM on your iPhone?

So Safari stops running out of memory and crashing. (I assume that's at least part of the problem. It's much worse with 64-bit than it was with 32-bit.)

So I can keep 2 websites in RAM at the same time instead of it reloading when I switch between them.

Apple fixing Safari's bad behavior and letting it sleep its state to flash would work too, but 6 iOS versions later it looks like they're incapable of that.

So you can keep more apps in memory without having the OS put them to sleep.