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Another great review as usual from Anandtech. Wow, Apple is still skimping on RAM at the expense of user experience. It would've been a great time to bump the

Another great review as usual from Anandtech. Wow, Apple is still skimping on RAM at the expense of user experience. It would've been a great time to bump the RAM up to 2GB given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption. It was already kind of bad on previous gen 32-bit iPads. It's still tempting to upgrade from the brick that the iPad 3 now feels but I'll live with it until the one with finger print reader, more RAM and fully baked iOS 7.1.x are out.

nwh 13y ago
iOS7 does have memory compression though.
- blinkingled 13y ago
  Right. But it still seems to be an overall increase of 20-30% for lightest of the use cases. >In general you’re looking at a 20 - 30% increase in memory footprint when dealing with an all 64-bit environment. At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases. With more apps open, including some doing work in the background, I do see relatively aggressive eviction of apps from memory. The most visible case is when Safari tabs have to be reloaded upon switching to them. Applications being evicted from memory don’t tend to be a huge problem since the A7 can reload them quickly.
  - glhaynes 13y ago
    I've always expected they would start to serialize open tabs to the flash storage to keep from having to reload them from the network. Seems (to me) like that'd be easy to do.
    - diroussel 13y ago
      Yes it would be easy, but the flash in these devices is quite slow compared to an SSD. Also what is the impact on energy usage?
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  Could you point me to a URL that shows that iOS7 have compressed memory? I couldn't find an official mention of it (maybe I'm searching for it wrong).
  - sarafiq 13y ago
    I guess it's mavericks not iOS7.
  - nwh 13y ago
    There's no official mention, but a few jailbreak developers have specifically talking about its existence. (MuscleNerd and Steffan Esser if my memory serves)
imjoshdean 13y ago
I'm not going to hold my breath on the actual RAM number until we see an iFixit teardown. Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if the Air had 2GB and the Mini had 1 GB.
- blinkingled 13y ago
  From the review - >The iPad Air, like the iPhone 5s, ships with 1GB of LPDDR3 memory. Apple frowns upon dissection of review samples but I think it’s a safe bet that we’re not talking about a PoP (Package-on-Package) configuration but rather discrete, external DRAM here. It’s also probably a safe bet that even the iPad mini with Retina Display will ship with 1GB of memory as well.
- baddox 13y ago
  > Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. Might that not have also been due to the iPad mini having a non-Retina display? Or does system RAM not matter much for that?
  - widdershins 13y ago
    It matters. You have to hold lots of double resolution images in memory, for example, which obviously eats memory up fast.
    - baddox 13y ago
      I wasn't sure how Retina vs. non-Retina apps behave in memory. Some apps presumably ship both sizes of assets, in which case the OS could load only the smaller ones into memory. But if an app only ships Retina assets, would those go straight into memory, or is the OS clever enough to resize them dynamically and throw that into memory?
gwright 13y ago
It is all about tradeoffs. Memory requires power and so more memory means a shorter battery life.
- blinkingled 13y ago
  Yes, in this case more RAM is arguably the better trade off. Less need to reload apps and browser tabs, better multitasking performance etc. are good things to have over the 15 min or whatever of battery loss it might take to power on additional 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It's just a vastly better user experience for the common use cases. (Besides there are other tablets with 2GB RAM and they come very close to iPad in terms of battery life so it shouldn't be that big of an issue.)
  - gwright 13y ago
    Its all about tradeoffs. How many customers would benefit from boosts in multi-tasking and tab re-loading vs. longer battery life? Apple is known for its outstanding battery life, does it make sense to step back from that for the benefits that you describe?
    - blinkingled 13y ago
      Whatever number of customers use a browser to browse the Internet using their iPad - they would benefit from the RAM increase. Besides it's not known how much exactly another GB would cost in terms of lost minutes of battery. Probably nothing to sweat about. But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)
      - gwright 13y ago
        I'm not defending them. Just pointing out that there are tradeoffs associated with the configurations you were advocating. That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.
        13y ago
forrestthewoods 13y ago
"given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption" I've not read about this. Can you cite a source?
- sandipc 13y ago
  Anand mentions it in this article.
- throwaway2048 13y ago
  larger pointers mean more ram is taken up by programs, its something that's a given with a transition from a 32bit to a 64bit architecture.
  - joakleaf 13y ago
    Yeah, pointers are double size, but the majority of RAM for iOS apps is used by images and other resources. These do not grow in size. Most apps are not using tens of megabytes for pointer based graph-structures etc. or code. They are however using loads of megabytes for image data, offscreen buffers, etc. So I doubt that 64-bit changes much.
tedunangst 13y ago
If they ship an ipad with 2GB, developers will start to use 2GB and then apps will run like crap on older models. Then people will complain about forced obsolescence. (Source: the dozens of comments I've read from people complaining their 512MB iOS device has been rendered useless.)
- blinkingled 13y ago
  Something's gotta give - after sticking to 1GB on 4 generations users would hardly complain about the newer one having more RAM - that's just technological progress. Macs no longer have 2GB RAM for example. Secondly developers would be stupid to use more RAM just because they can - if their app only runs on the latest iPad, I'd say that would be a big issue.
  - Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
    Particularly when the iPad 2 is still a current model. I suspect that's the thing holding them back.
- devx 13y ago
  Wouldn't that happen anyway if they do that next year?
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Either way someone suffers, kind of a silly dichotomy. Especially when modern android smartphones, let alone tablets, have 2GB of RAM. Also, Apple has the power to mandate that all apps have to run well on whatever old hardware Apple wants to keep supported. There's no good excuse.
  - simonh 13y ago
    Android devices switched up to high ram co figs because they had to. A typical Android device runs a ton of stuff in the background such as Facebook uploaders, sync services, location trackers, carrier services, manufacturer UI shells and crapwear, etc you just don't get on iOS devices. To be fair, a lot of these services can do useful stuff and the freedom to run stuff like that is one of the reasons some people like Android, but the result is a much larger overall memory utilisation. Apples approach to extending background services was to engineer a 'motion coprocessor' to handle one class of background tasks as efficiently as possible. Samsung et al just saw the memory utilisation on their devices go up from the services they're running so they jacked up the installed memory. The second consideration is battery life. Memory uses battery power all the time, whether that memory is doing anything useful or not. Apple is fanatical about power conservation. You don't get 10 hour battery life as a standard feature on your mobile devices by accident.

nwh 13y ago

iOS7 does have memory compression though.

blinkingled 13y ago
Right. But it still seems to be an overall increase of 20-30% for lightest of the use cases. >In general you’re looking at a 20 - 30% increase in memory footprint when dealing with an all 64-bit environment. At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases. With more apps open, including some doing work in the background, I do see relatively aggressive eviction of apps from memory. The most visible case is when Safari tabs have to be reloaded upon switching to them. Applications being evicted from memory don’t tend to be a huge problem since the A7 can reload them quickly.
- glhaynes 13y ago
  I've always expected they would start to serialize open tabs to the flash storage to keep from having to reload them from the network. Seems (to me) like that'd be easy to do.
  - diroussel 13y ago
    Yes it would be easy, but the flash in these devices is quite slow compared to an SSD. Also what is the impact on energy usage?
MikeCapone 13y ago
Could you point me to a URL that shows that iOS7 have compressed memory? I couldn't find an official mention of it (maybe I'm searching for it wrong).
- sarafiq 13y ago
  I guess it's mavericks not iOS7.
- nwh 13y ago
  There's no official mention, but a few jailbreak developers have specifically talking about its existence. (MuscleNerd and Steffan Esser if my memory serves)

imjoshdean 13y ago

I'm not going to hold my breath on the actual RAM number until we see an iFixit teardown. Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if the Air had 2GB and the Mini had 1 GB.

blinkingled 13y ago
From the review - >The iPad Air, like the iPhone 5s, ships with 1GB of LPDDR3 memory. Apple frowns upon dissection of review samples but I think it’s a safe bet that we’re not talking about a PoP (Package-on-Package) configuration but rather discrete, external DRAM here. It’s also probably a safe bet that even the iPad mini with Retina Display will ship with 1GB of memory as well.
baddox 13y ago
> Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. Might that not have also been due to the iPad mini having a non-Retina display? Or does system RAM not matter much for that?
- widdershins 13y ago
  It matters. You have to hold lots of double resolution images in memory, for example, which obviously eats memory up fast.
  - baddox 13y ago
    I wasn't sure how Retina vs. non-Retina apps behave in memory. Some apps presumably ship both sizes of assets, in which case the OS could load only the smaller ones into memory. But if an app only ships Retina assets, would those go straight into memory, or is the OS clever enough to resize them dynamically and throw that into memory?

gwright 13y ago

It is all about tradeoffs. Memory requires power and so more memory means a shorter battery life.

blinkingled 13y ago
Yes, in this case more RAM is arguably the better trade off. Less need to reload apps and browser tabs, better multitasking performance etc. are good things to have over the 15 min or whatever of battery loss it might take to power on additional 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It's just a vastly better user experience for the common use cases. (Besides there are other tablets with 2GB RAM and they come very close to iPad in terms of battery life so it shouldn't be that big of an issue.)
- gwright 13y ago
  Its all about tradeoffs. How many customers would benefit from boosts in multi-tasking and tab re-loading vs. longer battery life? Apple is known for its outstanding battery life, does it make sense to step back from that for the benefits that you describe?
  - blinkingled 13y ago
    Whatever number of customers use a browser to browse the Internet using their iPad - they would benefit from the RAM increase. Besides it's not known how much exactly another GB would cost in terms of lost minutes of battery. Probably nothing to sweat about. But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)
    - gwright 13y ago
      I'm not defending them. Just pointing out that there are tradeoffs associated with the configurations you were advocating. That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.
      - 13y ago

forrestthewoods 13y ago

"given the switch to 64-bit iOS 7 seems to be causing 20-30% higher memory consumption" I've not read about this. Can you cite a source?

sandipc 13y ago
Anand mentions it in this article.
throwaway2048 13y ago
larger pointers mean more ram is taken up by programs, its something that's a given with a transition from a 32bit to a 64bit architecture.
- joakleaf 13y ago
  Yeah, pointers are double size, but the majority of RAM for iOS apps is used by images and other resources. These do not grow in size. Most apps are not using tens of megabytes for pointer based graph-structures etc. or code. They are however using loads of megabytes for image data, offscreen buffers, etc. So I doubt that 64-bit changes much.

tedunangst 13y ago

If they ship an ipad with 2GB, developers will start to use 2GB and then apps will run like crap on older models. Then people will complain about forced obsolescence. (Source: the dozens of comments I've read from people complaining their 512MB iOS device has been rendered useless.)

blinkingled 13y ago
Something's gotta give - after sticking to 1GB on 4 generations users would hardly complain about the newer one having more RAM - that's just technological progress. Macs no longer have 2GB RAM for example. Secondly developers would be stupid to use more RAM just because they can - if their app only runs on the latest iPad, I'd say that would be a big issue.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  Particularly when the iPad 2 is still a current model. I suspect that's the thing holding them back.
devx 13y ago
Wouldn't that happen anyway if they do that next year?
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Either way someone suffers, kind of a silly dichotomy. Especially when modern android smartphones, let alone tablets, have 2GB of RAM. Also, Apple has the power to mandate that all apps have to run well on whatever old hardware Apple wants to keep supported. There's no good excuse.
- simonh 13y ago
  Android devices switched up to high ram co figs because they had to. A typical Android device runs a ton of stuff in the background such as Facebook uploaders, sync services, location trackers, carrier services, manufacturer UI shells and crapwear, etc you just don't get on iOS devices. To be fair, a lot of these services can do useful stuff and the freedom to run stuff like that is one of the reasons some people like Android, but the result is a much larger overall memory utilisation. Apples approach to extending background services was to engineer a 'motion coprocessor' to handle one class of background tasks as efficiently as possible. Samsung et al just saw the memory utilisation on their devices go up from the services they're running so they jacked up the installed memory. The second consideration is battery life. Memory uses battery power all the time, whether that memory is doing anything useful or not. Apple is fanatical about power conservation. You don't get 10 hour battery life as a standard feature on your mobile devices by accident.