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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why we get 12GB and 16GB RAM in these phones, but Apple sells its MacBook Air M3 with 8GB as the starting configuration.

Shouldn't mobile phones require much less RAM?

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It’s to run on-device LLM models. They require a lot of RAM. That is one of the reasons why only iPhone 15 Pro (only model with 8GB) is getting any Apple Intelligence features.

Because if Apple sold MacBook Air with more RAM, many people would prefer it instead of MacBook Pro.

128GB of storage in 2024 is the real shocker here.

This is what happens when your phone and all it's apps are written in a garbage collected language.

Yep. I still use the iphone 7+ as a backup phone, it still gets security updates and runs modern apps fine with 3GB! Slow compared to modern phones, but that's not down to the RAM, the memory management is amazing, never had an issue.

That’s a gross misrepresentation, and far from the whole truth. (Besides, ref counting is also a garbage collection algorithm)

A huge chunk of the OS runs native stuff. Add to it that android is less strict at putting apps/processes to sleep, it’s become a much less black and white question.

You are missing the point here – garbage collected languages (the "allocate it and forget about it" style, not refcounting like Objective-C) require much more memory to perform at the same level as a language where memory is explicitly allocated and deallocated.

Yes, I’m fairly familiar with garbage collectors and these are called tracing GCs. My point is that a big chunk of the system doesn’t use these, so you can’t just put the blame on one thing.

Would one percent be responsible for a system’s bad performance if that is “slow”?

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