M1 iPad Pro: Apps Reportedly Limited to Maximum of 5GB RAM, Even with 16GB | Hacker News Reader

M1 iPad Pro: Apps Reportedly Limited to Maximum of 5GB RAM, Even with 16GB

macrumors.com

21 pointstosh27 comments

Somewhere at Apple, I swear they have an internal Terminal iOS app. And I want it. It would be one of the biggest “Pro” things they could do.

I don’t want a lot of the incumbent developer tool apps on the App Store. Third-party devs suck at creating good Apple ecosystem apps.

I’m constantly appalled by the amount of low quality apps on the App Store because so many developers fail to either 1. Create good designs for their apps or 2. At least use the Apple Human Interface Guidelines[1] if you’re unable to come up with your own good branding and UI

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

> developers are reportedly severely limited in the amount they can actually use.

When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

> When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

When you want to use 6 GB..

>When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

I believe around the year 2000 AMD announced AMD64 and Intel spent years insisting nobody needed 64-bit on the desktop. Then promptly got trounced by AMD for years after they finally released an AMD64 based desktop and Intel scrambled to create a netburst CPU with 64-bit capabilities. So, a long time?

That is system wide. A far cry from per process 5GB limit. I can't imagine a IPad pro toy app ever needing more then that. All of the things you'd need more for you cannot do on an Ipad.

Not necessarily, with PAE you were limited to 4gb per application while having more systemwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

No. Starting with the Pentium Pro, 32 bit x86 could leverage up to 64GB of physical RAM using PAE. (Physical Address Extension) x86-64 was created to address the 3GB (or 3.5GB, or 2GB, depending on the OS configuration) process limit.

You can do quite a bit more than "toy apps" on an iPad. Photoshop and 4k video editing come to mind.

How many GB do you have in the computer you are typing on?

I would say the 4gb limit was reached about 4 to 5 years ago.

Remember the pro is Apples idea of a replacement for a laptop and now it has a laptop class processor, why shouldn't it have laptop class ram?

To illustrate a real-world example of a "pro" use-case: these devices are absolute monsters at processing video. How much memory do you need to edit 4k video? The answer is likely "how much have you got?"

That’s the wrong answer and always has been. You don’t need to store your entire video in RAM to edit it, and never have. I’m sure you can find many descriptions of how it actually works without having to guess but 4K video processing and editing has been done for decades and decades now on computers with barely Apple Watch grade CPUs. George Lucas was using an EditDroid to edit 35mm film through the generation of edit lists on a computer controlling a Laserdisc player. The computer had very limited RAM, IIRC 16MB which was extravagant at the time.

The editing process for the average YouTube ‘content creator’ may consist of previewing a bunch of effects and transitions and animated floating text in real time until they think they’ve hit the right viral load but in practice professional editing is still done by the composition of edit lists from preview material.

> 4K video processing ... decades and decades

Hmmm... "decades and decades" seems like a stretch for digital. ;)

Are you meaning using things like Avid Composer and similar? eg software used for hollywood films and similar

Asking because I used to spec out then put those systems together for places. They were _very_ much pushing the envelope of performance (cpu, ram, disk io), even before networked editing systems became common.

When I installed Android Studio.

When I install Visual Studio.

Wasn't Visual Studio a 32bit application up to now, so that it can't use more than 4GB? I think an announcement for the next version contained 64bit? But sure - some of the sub-processes it starts might use more memory

Visual Studio 2019 and MSVC 16 are 32 bit applications, even on 64 bit Windows. They have a 3GB process limit.

Hopefully VS 2022 will be 64 bit.

4K video editing maybe.

This limit makes sense for a mobile device. You don’t want some developer using up all the RAM and stomping on other processes like what happens with older generation iPads ALL THE TIME and I’m sure some Apple people got sick of certain programs kicking everything else out of memory.

5GB is enough for anybody, even with 4K video.

I won’t be surprised if it’s an iOS 14 limit, and gets raised in iOS 15 at WWDC.

Uh - these are user devices - don't most users run multiple apps? It seems some kind of upper limit per app is not totally unreasonable. What's the OOM killer equiv on ipad?

iPad Pro: amazing hardware, but still limited by software

not sure if i'd call it amazing, but it certainly does its job

I'm not kidding when I say that I would pay a literal 3x premium for an Ipad Pro that can run linux.

Linux should still be a subpar experience on the iPad. Apple is not going to write Linux drivers for their hardware.

Well iOS is also a subpar experience on the ipad pro. Besides Apple does not need to write drivers for it. The ipad pro is just a macbook with no builtin keyboard and with a 120hz mini-led touch screen. Work on getting linux to work on it is essentially a few months to a year away most likely. Apple only has to allow users to run non-apple OS on it.

These things are a trade off. Developers should be targeting a platform rather than the hardware. Why would the user be concerned about the app pegging their ram and how to deal with it.

Yes. It seems to me that Apple really, really wants the iPad to be sold as a computer replacement and likes to think the problem is how powerful the hardware is, which is an issue for approximately 0.1% of their users, when the real issue is that it runs a toy OS.

With Mac OS X on ARM, Apple needs to port OS X to the iPad, otherwise they should stop production.

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