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Comment by loire280 | Hacker News Reader

While better specs certainly never hurt, I've never heard any iPad users complain processing power or RAM. iOS does memory management seamlessly (if I didn't understand how it worked, I probably wouldn't even notice it) and the interface is notably responsive.

I'm sure the new version will have a spec bump. Whatever that ends up meaning (dual core, faster, more RAM), it will continue to be plenty.

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I'll complain.

The ipad is a second class browsing experience not because of the lack of flash, but the lack of cache. It's just not anywhere near as snappy reading as a Real Computer(tm) because it's constantly reloading stuff that's been purged.

My usual style of reading (on the desktop) is to pop open a pile of stuff in tabs, then batch read through. Can't do that on the iPad.

Safari could also use a few more cycles to make it seem that much snappier. While it feels like magic, and I would have killed for its browsing performance a few years back, it just doesn't feel quite there yet.

Also, just in the last month or so, I've noticed some sort of background task that causes stuttering in some places. (mainly in angry birds). For the first time, I've noticed that I needed to restart it. Its' a small thing, but it's also the first time I've had to resort to computer troubleshooting on it.

FWIW, iCab/Terra help with this style of browsing a little bit. They don't seem to cache as much and do a better job of handling more background tabs with things waiting to be read.

I'm trying Terra right now ... Hadn't heard of it yet, so thanks! I just posted a question to see what everyone's favorite iPad browser is and why - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2200302, hopefully we'll get some good discussion there about alternate browsers. I've considered buying iCab; what are your thoughts on it versus Terra?

By default iOS only uses an in-memory cache for HTTP (including in Safari). Developers have the option of augmenting it with a disk cache if they so choose, but few do.

The current iteration could stand some more RAM (and/or Safari could be smarter about how it purges its page cache). With the latest version of iOS, I can only keep a single page in memory at a time and reloading pages when hopping between two is less than desirable.

Sometimes, even one page is enough to illustrate the problem.

e.g. The Boston Globe's Big Picture blog

Maybe no users complain, but as a developer I often think, god damn, why is there so few RAM in there. And no iOS doesn't do memory managment seamlessy, the responsiveness comes from developers working hard to constantly cache/unchache everything that might take up a few megs.

My guess is that it's related to supply constraints. They sold 14 million of them last year. That's a lot of chips.

Is their RAM special in some way that might make it a supply constraint big enough to warrant limiting the memory in the iPad so much?

I doubt supply constraints are an issue. They're the single largest purchaser of flash memory in the world[1]. I imagine manufacturers would be bending over backwards for them, since their orders must all be quite large.

[1]:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/10/21/macboo...

I think they did everything to get the price down to $499 - including removing camera and reducing RAM. I'm guessing they thought that the $499 price point was required to make iPad a hit.

$499 is a very symbolic price.

As all the rumor sites (e.g., WSJ ;-) are predicting, it'll definitely have at least 512MB of RAM (can't imagine it having less than the iPhone 4).

But that's still pretty anemic, as jonhohle noted: that's not enough to keep a lot of pages in Safari's cache. (Though, from my experiments, Safari/WebKit is REALLY aggressive about minimizing memory usage, perhaps even stupidly.)

According to this Engadget comparison (http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/09/hp-touchpad-vs-ipad-vs-xo...), competing tablets (TouchPad, Xoom, PlayBook) all have 1GB of RAM. It wouldn't be surprising for the 2nd iPad to have 1GB or more RAM.

Anyone know why they're skimping on the RAM?

Does the ipad need some super-special expensive DIMMs? Is it about power consumption?

A 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM costs a measly $40 bucks. I don't think the ipad target audience would care if apple added that to the MSRP.

It's almost certainly about power consumption; Apple absolutely loves being able to tout huge battery life compared to the competition, and one way they do that i s by being tighter on things like RAM usage.

It's also worth pointing out that the RAM lives in a Package-on-Package configuration right on the CPU die. They're not exactly buying mass market SO-DIMMs and sticking them in a bog-standard bus, so the cost per MB is probably higher.

The processor and the ram are stacked on the same chip. So they're kinda limited as to what they can put in there. I doubt that you could fit a SO-DIMM of any stripe inside an ipad case, nor would you want the power problems.

There was a teardown of the chip assembly done back when the ipad came out that has some good details: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-A4-Teardown/2204/1

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