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Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

Not an apples to apples comparison#. iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.

# pun intended

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Of course it's not an apple to apple comparison, the iPhone 7 from the same year was 50% more expensive and had only one third of the RAM (2 GB)

plus has memory compression.

FYI, Android has had zRAM support since KitKat, which is from (checking notes) 2013. Same year as iOS.

iOS uses way less ram than android

Common measurements I have seen is around 40%, I wouldn't say way less, but it is definitely less. Still, 3x more for a model in the same year is impressive (and more than needed to be competitive with iOS) and we should give OnePlus credit for it.

Sadly a lot of low-ish to midrange phones are going back or sticking to 6-8GB today, thanks to the RAM squeeze and the efficiency of iOS is certainly helping Apple here. Certainly nobody is going to complain about the performance of the iPhone 17, despite only having 8GB RAM.

In Android, Samsung doesn't seem to suffer as much. You can pick up an S26 here with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage for 623 Euro, which is a nice midrange price. I guess there are benefits if you can produce your own memory.

> 623 Euro, which is a nice midrange price [for a phone].

How did we get here?

Our central planners allocated all the RAM to AI and almost none to phones.

Apple is already past that, with the entry-level 17e starting at 700 Euro. The midrange regular 17 starts at 950 Euro. And according to rumors those prices are likely to increase in spring if not earlier.

> entry-level 17e starting at 700 Euro

Which is 30% less than the original iPhone accounting for inflation.

iPhone 1 launched at 649 Euros in France in 2007 money, or about 980 Euros today.

Given inflation and the increased utility of the smartphone, we're almost certainly at the lowest cost per hour of use ever for most people.

> for most people

For most people, salaries have not kept up with inflation

What's funny is that due in part to minimum wage laws (which caused some of the inflation) the lowest quintile is arguably the one who's kept up with inflation better than the rest, meaning there has been an improvement in the wealth inequality department. But nobody talks about it. Meanwhile I've lost like 20% of my buying power to inflation in the past 3-4 years even taking the meager raises into account.

> FYI, Android has had zRAM support since KitKat, which is from (checking notes) 2013. Same year as iOS.

iOS compresses regular pages, it doesn't need to go through the swap system to compress/decompress them.

This imho should end up having better savings and performance. zswap when it gains support for non-swap usage may close the gap.

Maybe it's not technically a "swap system" but I'll be shocked if they're not doing effectively the same thing. How could you avoid having active uncompressed pages and inactive compressed pages? The amount of tracking you'd need to do to use compressed pages directly seems like an impossible amount of overhead.

There are good articles that explain that and OP is right.

Can you link one? A quick search just showed me information about compressing inactive apps and that requires very bulky actions with a lot of overhead, much more than going per page. Plus information about compressing inactive pages in a way that's basically the same as swap. Is there a third method I'm not aware of?

> iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.

Yeah, by aggressively purging all my Safari tabs (and Apps) unexpectedly, during the most convenient times, like when I'm going through a tunnel on the train and my cellular connection is at its best. Still infuriatingly common on my 17 Pro with 12GB of RAM.

iPhones from that era constantly booted apps out of RAM when you toggled between them, making it really slow to have more than a few apps open at the same time.

These issues pretty much never happened with these big RAM android phones.

I know because I had both and it was night and day. Like going from a netbook to a desktop machine.

Regarding memory compression: isn't the use of `zswap` and `zram` commonplace on embedded Linux at this point?

Akshully

Careful. If you acknowledge this provable fact you just invite hordes of specs-table-rotted gigahertz-chasers to post replies that completely miss the point.

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