Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadw3ight | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the original Apple watch had like half a GB, and a raspberry pi zero ($5 price) has the same. Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?

View on HN

It's a microcontroller rather than an application chip - so the amount of RAM will always be significantly less. A really beefy high end microcontroller might have 1MB of internal RAM - and for most applications that's more than enough.

Ohhhhh, I didn't realize that. Makes a lot more sense, I guess it is a better comparison to an Arduino than a raspberry pi.

> Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?

Oh they could have. The problem is: it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you and most of the documentation is under NDA.

> it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you

That's a really good point. I remember having the Pebble watch (this was pre-Apple and Android watches) and I think it had 128 KB of RAM total, including OS, background tasks, apps, etc. That was a mass produced and commercialized item though.

I've written about the other challenges in another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25252022

Slapping on a more RAM on the PCB is not free energy-wise. The watch only has a 180mAh battery that needs to provide power for an entire week.

I mentioned in another comment about how I had the Pebble watch (before Apple and Android watches were a thing) and it had 128 kb ram total, but it lasted 11 days. That thing was a beast, but as someone else mentioned cost is a. big consideration too. It had 150 mAh on the newer models, before it was discontinued, so while I'm sure it definitely eats up energy I think it's definitely possible to fit more RAM in the power constraints.

Granted that was an e-paper display. (They had color and black and white options)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com