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Comment by williamstein | Hacker News Reader

They have deprecated the whole idea of RAM as a spec. At https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/, they only list "capacity" (of 64GB, 256GB, 512GB), and have no mention of RAM anywhere. Interesting. I guess they are viewing RAM versus persistent flash memory as just another level of tiering/caching, and believe their swap is so good that it all blends together.

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And yet, a short period of working with some large apps shows that, in fact, it isn't quite so good at all: from Safari pages refreshing to apps "paging in", the lack of ram is clearly present once one starts really working with iOS devices.

I look forward to the new device showing a new day... but I'm not holding my breath.

Apple's always been weird about ram. They're the last place to upgrade ram across product lines - but the first to dump peripherals/connectors like optical drives and headphone jacks.

Most manufacturers are. I bought my laptop 3 years ago with 12GB of RAM and now the best I can get in a similarly sized model is 16. Sad.

I guess they are viewing RAM versus persistent flash memory as just another level of tiering/caching, and believe their swap is so good that it all blends together.

I think this is the correct long-term view, as persistent solid state memory gets better and cheaper. The old 20th century memory hierarchy, with nothing between RAM and spinning platter hard drives should fade into the past. As technology changes, this is sure to be an obsolete model of the world that no longer fits.

iOS doesn't do "traditional" swap though. Once memory runs low, apps will be warned and may be booted out to free some up. It's up to the apps to then persist their state to the solid-state storage.

I don't think Apple has ever displayed the amount of RAM on iOS-family product pages.

Same. Usually it takes one of the companies that open up new products seeing what kind of RAM is on the logic board to know what a device has.

IIRC they also lie about the amount of RAM when you query sysctl. iOS apps aren't allowed to use all of the RAM on devices and so the system simply lies to the app about how much RAM there is.

As an illustrator I dabbled with the iPad Pro when it first launched. Pencil was great, but lack of RAM was really noticeable when adding layers on a high resolution sketch in the watered down Adobe apps.

So the additional UI functionality announced today is great news, but yes, lack of RAM undercuts performance one might expect from a Pro product.

Which is particularly annoying because I have the feeling safari on my ipad pro is crashing all the time because of running out of RAM on demanding webpages.

iOS does not have a swap space. The closest you get is persistent app data that can be reloaded and discarded. As far as app development goes, you need to be very conscious of RAM usage.

This has been the case for several years now on iPad spec pages.

Haven't they also made RAM more important? I saw a tweet saying you can now have 3 apps at a time (split screen + one floating) but apparently this somehow requires 4GB of RAM. I find it hard to believe my iPad Air 2 couldn't do it just fine, but I don't think it has 4GB so apparently it's not allowed.

iOS is designed from the ground up to use RAM extremely efficiently. So Apple gets the performance equivalent to a competing product with less RAM. So they'd never want to brag about how much RAM is in an iPad, since it is generally half of what an equivalent product not running iOS would have.

But why not offer a way to upgrade the ram? i.e. Have a 10.5" "heavy duty" model with double the ram.

Your last point is interesting, but RAM is as relevant a spec as some of the others Apple still lists, like the A10 64-bit processor. If I'm not supposed to care how much memory there is, why should I care whether there's a 64-bit or a 43-bit processor, or a f/2.2 camera lens?

They never have.

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