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Comment by klipklop | Hacker News Reader

Never understand why apple ships their iPads and Macbooks with such little ram by default. Yes I understand profit, but it really limits what these devices can do. The numbers have not really changed much in the last several years...

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Limiting the amount of ram goes a long way in reducing power consumption. It takes constant voltage to keep the cells alive, even when the device is locked and seemingly doing nothing.

The iPad really does have great battery life on the other hand.

I may be way off base but I think on iPhones/iPads RAM isn't a concern so much as processes sitting in the background keeping the CPU and radios doing cartwheels indefinitely for little to no reason, as they tend to on desktop operating systems. By throttling or quitting backgrounded apps they've made it much more reasonable to deliver promised numbers on battery life.

Are you saying there is battery life difference between 8gb vs 16gb MacBook too? (Since iPad Pro only comes in 8gb)

iPad Pro comes in 8GB and 16GB variants.

Scroll down to "Chip": https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

Apple wants strict market segmentation. Why would they sell you once device that does everything when they can sell you 2 or 3 devices for specific tasks.

There might even be some logic to that with each device optimized for it's specific best purpose. It also doesn't hurt that it makes them more money.

I think Apple is very much a mega-corp who does everything to create greater profit but I'm not sure they are limiting devices to make sure you buy more. More than likely it's because iPadOS is based on iOS, and thus it's naturally more of a consumption device with all of those locked down hard limits.

IMO they should do a hard turn and make iPadOS it's own thing. Give it the benefits of iOS but with macOS flexibility. Right now, it's essentially a bigger phone.

Lots of RAM uses more battery. Not a huge amount, but battery life is something Apple and its customers weigh more heavily. Same reason for aggressive suspending of background apps.

It's not that aenemic in current form though, with the 1TB model it has 16GB.

I'm pretty sure Final Cut Pro would export a video in the background of an 8GB MBA just fine.

All macbooks come with min 16gb now, except maybe macbook air.

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