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Does anybody think iOS 9 will help negate the need for more RAM?
- Thread starter shenfrey
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Apple's stock apps reload, even the notes app. It's a RAM issue pure and simple. Bung more in and end of problem.
I remember posting when Safari crashed, I looked in the logs and it said "low memory". And yet there were several posters trying to convince everyone or make excuses for Apple that "low memory" errors, could mean something else.
I can vouch for this. More RAM was the one of the main reasons I upgraded from iPad Air 1 to Air 2 and miraculously all the reloading issues just disappeared.
In fact I remember playing a game on the Air 2 and then forgetting about it for a couple of hours while I did some other things. I came back to it after opening multiple other apps, expecting to reload but no, it just carried on from where it left off, I was amazed!
So many people here are so against it for some reason, yet I can't understand why.
We're not on iOS 6 anymore, iPhones need more RAM.
/thread
Indeed. I swear Apple don't test anything before design or release. iOS8 is 'ok' now after 8.3 but how many months in??
It would appear that those who test the RAM are people who 'do all their main work on a Mac' and use their phones as a phone. It probably doesn't hit them that some people might actually use more than one browser tab and might want to swap between apps and Safari without losing anything. Perhaps their target audience really is people who just do a quick Google for train times and mainly play games or send iMessages...
So many people here say that their phones work 'flawlessly' and that they don't need more RAM. Perhaps Tim Cook and Jonny Ive use their phones in a basic manner too and don't realise that the amount of RAM is severely limiting for some of us.
Web pages in the late 90's were optimized to use data measured in kilobytes. These days, I've seen production websites that load megabytes worth of data just on their home screen.
The more data loaded (as text) the more that needs to be rendered. The more you need to render, the more important RAM becomes. Apple needs to up their game to 2gb of RAM, and they needed to do it yesterday.
Having said that, more RAM means more battery usage. And since they're trying to keep their phone as slim as possible, that would mean worse battery life.
My bet is that Apple would rather RAM starve the phone, create planned obsolescence, keep their profit margins up, and keep a decent battery life, than add more RAM.
The more data loaded (as text) the more that needs to be rendered. The more you need to render, the more important RAM becomes. Apple needs to up their game to 2gb of RAM, and they needed to do it yesterday.
Having said that, more RAM means more battery usage. And since they're trying to keep their phone as slim as possible, that would mean worse battery life.
My bet is that Apple would rather RAM starve the phone, create planned obsolescence, keep their profit margins up, and keep a decent battery life, than add more RAM.
The 6S needs a minimum of 2GB and the iPhone 7 should roll out 3 or even 4GB. Either Apple are wanting the iPhone to be the best phone or they're wanting it to be the best smartphone. Currently it's the former. Crazily, the iPhone 5 was their best stab at an actual smartphone and due to RAM starvation it has been downhill since. The days of iPhones needing way less RAM than Android smartphones are well and truly over. Ever since the 5S was released iPhones have had insufficient RAM and now with the 6+ especially it is woefully insufficient.
Increased battery usage could be nullified by making the body of the phone slightly less thin and slapping a bigger battery in there. A beneficial side effect of this would be a non-protruding camera.
No. More RAM means less battery usage. If your web page reloads because of lack of RAM, you end up using more 3G or WiFi data. That means more power is required to load web pages.
Newer processor optimisations will easily make up for negligible increased power usage for extra chip of RAM. Or Apple can use even more efficient RAM chip.
So this increased power consumption argument has already been put to rest long time ago on macrumours.
That aspect of it has less to do with testing and more with basically just Apple's design. They don't feel they need to increase the specs as quickly and early and do it later. Whether it's to save some money or get people to upgrade sooner or something else is a somewhat different question.
Better than what?
It's certainly not impossible especially if there was something going on with a previous install, but it would seem like it would be more of an exception than the rule essentially.
Better than any other version of 7 or 8 that was on it. I wouldn't say that it would be an exception, as we don't know how many 4S's were slowed down as opposed to running great.
I don't remember about 6, but better than any version of 7. I would venture to say that there are more people satisfied with 8 on their 4S than dissatisfied.
Interesting. What are your criteria for judging the performance now versus how it was?
So this is not actually the case iOS 6 was a feature and optimization build. The 7 smashed it 8 fixed some stuff but brought whole new feature sets. So i think it is time for there 3 year clean up build. The major issue in mobile is there is some stiff compassion from android
You still didn't answer my questions, though. You're just reiterating your statement.
How do we know the RAM is the culprit and OS inherently by design is not supposed to behave this way? Do we have real evidence that RAM is the bottle neck?
This RAM rhetoric bugs me, and that too with no real evidence showing that RAM is THE bottleneck. All the posts are anecdotal evidences without any real engineering/scientific assessment. There are plenty of other places that might be the issue - RAM, CPU and GPU allocation, processor cache memory, memory paging and OS itself on how it handles memory.
I keep saying that the iPhone 5 didn't behave like this, so unless you're saying that Apple purposefully made the 5S, 6 and to an even greater extent the 6+ reload apps & browser tabs like crazy and that they wanted these phones to be worse than the iPhone 5....then I would assume that iOS isn't supposed to behave this way.
An example proving that RAM is the bottleneck would be the iPad Air2 getting 2 gigs of RAM and suddenly reloading way less.
I'm not so sure. The amount of power requires to keep double the RAM powered would have to be a lot, possibly more power than would be used to re-load webpages occasionally. Remember - if you're using the phone, wifi is on anyway, so this would only occur if you opened a site, than came back at a later session and only wanted to see that single page again. Otherwise your wifi/3g radio has to get used either way.
Exactly. Most people just think more RAM will solve all their woes with iOS, world peace will be attained and hunger will cease to exist.
Look at Android flagships. They have 3/4 GB of RAM and still have optimization problems with Lollipop.
It's not just the RAM, it's the OS. iOS is way, way more efficient. Lollipop struggles under 1 GB RAM. iOS definitely does not.
Name me any half-decent Andoid phone or tablet that has 1GB of RAM, let alone less.
Most have 3GB and some are starting to come with 4GB.
My Android tablet has 1.5GB of RAM and doesn't reload browser tabs or apps anything like as readily as my iPhone 6+. That's with only 1.5GB of RAM. So please don't wheel out this tired cliche that Android needs way more RAM than iOS because it just doesn't anymore. I gave up believing that after my iPhone 4 ownership.
Not a cliché. You're the one complaining, I'm just pointing out basic stuff.
Watch this video. The iPhone 6 performs well against Android flagships with 3x/4x the RAM.
It doesn't perform better when it comes to tab and app reloading, which is what I'm complaining about. In fact it couldn't perform any worse in that regard. It really is that bad.