iPod Touch 4th Gen RAM and the iPad

[Don Kosak]

Well, the teardown has spilled the beans, the iPod Touch 4th Gen. has the same amount of RAM as the iPAD.

I think this is great news for iPad owners. Developers wanting to target new devices will have to take the 256MB RAM spec as a guide post to optimize for.

I was a little concerned when the iPhone 4 came out with 512mb that folks would start writing memory hungry apps, and make the iPad 1st Gen obsolete within a year.

Now, I feel the 1st Gen iPad has just gotten an extra 1-2 years of solid App support on top of the 1-2 years it already had.

As a developer, even using Open GL, the big bottleneck is the CPU and network latency. RAM is hardly ever an issue, unless you have a nasty leak. 256MB is a reasonable number to work with.

Remember, the Sony PlayStation 3 has 256MB of RAM, and that hasn't had much impact on the quality of software you see for it.

In a year or so, I'm sure we'll see more 512MB iOS devices -- but for now, 256 RAM seems to be the prime memory watermark. And our iPads are right there.

 

[EssentialParado]

Veery good post, Dan.

Hopefully it will alleviate some of the illogical attention toward 256 vs 512.

 

[lozpop]

Really a good news! Apps won't want 512 MB required.

 

[sapporobaby]

Thanks Dan. For all the logic of your post, some will still come here and complain about the supposed lack of ram.

 

[stordoff]

I've presumed all along that the extra RAM in the iPhone is to cover the overheads of it being a phone. This pretty much confirms it for me.