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Comment by scott_karana | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda strange, honestly: 2011's state-of-the-art Android phones (Galaxy S2) had 1GB RAM, and yet Apple is still stuck on that maximum, while Android has long moved on to 2GB on flagships. Kind of a shame :(

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Perhaps Apple can afford to keep iiOS devices at 1 GB of RAM and thus save battery life because iOS uses automatic reference counting rather than garbage collection, so applications' memory high watermarks stay lower. I imagine that's what Drew Crawford would argue, anyway (see http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...).

Why would they save any notable battery life?

I was under the impression that RAM had only negligible differences in consumption per-module, and capacity per-module has increased dramatically.

Besides, the main source of power usage is the screen.

Isn't RAM more of a factor for power consumption when in standby?

I understand that additional RAM chips onboard would cause increased power consumption, but I am confused about why a chip with the same physical footprint and more storage would cause increased standby consumption.

Does a DRAM refresh for a denser chip draw substantially more power, or something?

(Legitimate question, I am obviously not an expert and I'd just love to learn more about this)

I'm no expert either. Honestly, I was just guessing. I observed that Apple was sticking with 1 GB of RAM for the third iPhone model in a row, and figured there must be a good reason. But maybe they're just being cheap because they think it doesn't matter.

The Galaxy Note 3 has 3GB of RAM and that was released a year ago.

And yet they continue to pack more power into a smaller package. So how do you explain it? Ram is cheap and small. Yes it uses power but not all that much and certainly it would be worth it for a more powerful device.

The only logical explanation I can come to is... more RAM won't make a meaningful impact on the experience. More ram is the cure-all on a desktop but that's not apples-to-apples.

>And yet they continue to pack more power into a smaller package.

Well, not this time =p

The A8 is fabbed using a new 20nm process, so part of the phone is more power in a smaller package.

>more RAM won't make a meaningful impact on the experience

Except when it would, as in, the case we are discussing right now.

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