About the iPad RAM

[topmounter]

Apple will release a new iPad in 12 months with Over 100 New Features™, which 98% of you will buy regardless of how much RAM is in your current iPad.

1.9% of you will buy the new iPad because it comes in white.

And 0.1% of you will figure out a way to upgrade the RAM in your current iPad and then end up Jailbreaking it to run a bunch of unsupported software just to find a benefit to the RAM you added.

As we all know, if this iPad needed 512MB of RAM, then Steve Jobs would have blessed it with 512MB of RAM.

 

[vw195]

You're still making a leap in order to worry about something that may never happen. That's a pattern that can make for a crappy life.

Heh its not a leap because it just happened. I had Atomic Browser open with 3 tabs and thats all. Even closed mail. So I backgrounded Atomic so I could change some settings in Settings, and I go to go back into atomic and see that the OS closed out atomic due to lack of memory. It had 19 megs free before I went into settings.

After it closed everything down, it said I only had 67 megs. Fact of the matter is my iPad has a huge memory leak which in turn exacerbates the low memory issue. This could be due to cydia (damned if you do damned if you dont) or it could be regular ipad apps. Heh this iPad has to rebooted twice as much as my windows phone.

So the issue is indeed here, but I am still working on getting a better life

 

[brentsg]

Fact of the matter is my iPad has a huge memory leak which in turn exacerbates the low memory issue. This could be due to cydia (damned if you do damned if you dont) or it could be regular ipad apps.

Well once you jailbreak and start running all the unapproved apps then all bets are off. I've seen that firsthand from my phone. There are some nifty things there but the QC leaves something to be desired.

 

[VTMac]

Heh its not a leap because it just happened. I had Atomic Browser open with 3 tabs and thats all. Even closed mail. So I backgrounded Atomic so I could change some settings in Settings, and I go to go back into atomic and see that the OS closed out atomic due to lack of memory. It had 19 megs free before I went into settings.

After it closed everything down, it said I only had 67 megs. Fact of the matter is my iPad has a huge memory leak which in turn exacerbates the low memory issue. This could be due to cydia (damned if you do damned if you dont) or it could be regular ipad apps. Heh this iPad has to rebooted twice as much as my windows phone.

So the issue is indeed here, but I am still working on getting a better life

Memory leaks from a jailbreak are not a valid reason to desire more memory. 3 Gigs won't fix the problem, it will only defer it slightly longer. Almost all memory problems are the result of buggy software. The more jailbreak stuff you run, the more buggy software you're running, in my experience. Apps that get shipped through the app store get a (quick) test for memory leaks.

 

[Treebark]

To those that say the iPad runs just fine and don't see the need for more ram try having 4-5 Safari windows open and go back to the first one. See how the page reloads? That is because there isn't enought RAM and the page is cycled again. Pain in the arse.

Now, other than that, I do have to agree w/o large image/photo editing or emulators to run, 256 seems quite sufficient. But man, why can't we have more than a few windows in safari open w/o the need to reload the page??????

 

[DenniZ]

To those that say the iPad runs just fine and don't see the need for more ram try having 4-5 Safari windows open and go back to the first one. See how the page reloads? That is because there isn't enought RAM and the page is cycled again. Pain in the arse.

Now, other than that, I do have to agree w/o large image/photo editing or emulators to run, 256 seems quite sufficient. But man, why can't we have more than a few windows in safari open w/o the need to reload the page??????

Personally, I just think its a software problem about the reloading of pages, my guess is that safari does not properly cache the page data, hence why it reloads, I'd be happy for safari to eat into my storage space with a cache of the page rather than keep it in the ram.

 

[Lara F]

If it gives some hope, I can say that prior to iOS4 I could not reliably "pre-load" tabs in Safari (for transit through no-signal areas) on my 3GS without it crashing or needing reloading. Now, so far so good. So I do think there should be some improvement on the iPad for the fall release.

I still think 256 was a too stingy amount though.

 

[topmounter]

It will be interesting to compare performance between an iPhone4 and an iPad running iOS4. I know iOS4 runs great on my two year old iPhone 3G (It seems faster than 3.x did).


It's not like anyone found a reason to complain about the amount of RAM in the iPad before they found out about the amount of RAM in the iPhone4.

 

[greygray]

It doesn't really matter to me, because I've never experienced a low memory issue or had to force-close my apps before.

 

[Grievous Angel]

You're still making a leap in order to worry about something that may never happen. That's a pattern that can make for a crappy life.

And the term "You cannot dispute" is generally always off the mark when thrown about on a forum like this. You may be right, you may be wrong, but that phrase reflects the kind of "I'm right and you're wrong" mentality that seems to take over when people get to debate in a relatively anon setting. There's almost always a gray area with some middle ground.

Does the new new phone have or not have twice the memory? Did the engineers decide or not decide that they needed it?

I don't understand the "gray" area in the assertion. I'm quoting a spec sheet for the first, and using basic logic (that apple wouldn't put twice the memory just for poops and giggles).

 

[nightfly13]

Is it as crucial given the 'storage' is fast ssd-like chip?

My lack of engineering expertise will become evident very shortly, but is there really such a drop off in ram performance vs the 16/32/64gb solid state storage chips? I have privately theorized part of the reason for the iPad's great performance/consumption ratio is because it's got a state of the art ssd or equivalent. Wonder if a chunk of 'storage' could be re-tasked to serve as slightly slower ram?

Sent from my memory-deficient iPad

 

[topmounter]

Does the new new phone have or not have twice the memory? Did the engineers decide or not decide that they needed it?

I don't understand the "gray" area in the assertion. I'm quoting a spec sheet for the first, and using basic logic (that apple wouldn't put twice the memory just for poops and giggles).

Working on the "basic logic" assumption then, if they did not put more than 256MB of RAM in the iPad, then it does not 'need' it.

Are people complaining about the performance of iOS4 on the 3GS?

 

[blackNBUK]

Does the new new phone have or not have twice the memory? Did the engineers decide or not decide that they needed it?

I don't understand the "gray" area in the assertion. I'm quoting a spec sheet for the first, and using basic logic (that apple wouldn't put twice the memory just for poops and giggles).

I don't think that this logic really works. More memory is always going to be better than less memory. The fact that the iPhone 4 has more memory doesn't really say anything about whether iOS 4 'needs' 512Mb Given that they've released it for the 3GS it seems likely that 256Mb is enough.

My best guess is that the 512Mb A4 chip wasn't ready in time for the iPad's launch and instead of delaying the product and have it conflict with the iPhone 4 launch they decided to release with 256Mbs.