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16GB of RAM Could Be the New Minimum in Apple's Upcoming M4 Macs
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here. Either way, hardware has a substantially longer turnaround time compared to software. The iPhone 15 would've been in development years before release (I'm assuming they're developing multiple generations in parallel, which is very likely the case) and keep in mind that the internals are basically identical to the iPhone 14 Pro, featuring the same SoC.
AI and maybe AAA games like Resident Evil aside, 6 GB seems to work very well on iPhones. If I had a Pixel 6/7/8 Pro with 12 GB and an iPhone 12/13/14 Pro (or 15) with 6 GB, I likely wouldn't notice the difference unless I specifically counted the number of recent applications I could reopen without them reloading. 6 GB keeps plenty of recent apps in memory on iOS.
But I'm not sure going with 8 GB in the new models knowing that AI is a thing and the minimum requirement for their first series of models is 8 GB is too reassuring. I'm sure these devices will get 5-8 years of software updates, but new AI features might be reduced or not present at all on these models then.
When talking about "AI" in this context I'm talking about everything new under the "Apple Intelligence" umbrella, like LLMs and image generators. They've done what you'd call "AI" nowadays for many years on their devices, like photo analysis, computational photography, voice isolation, "Siri" recommendations etc.
I was under the impression that ios used sleight of hand with apps to reduce memory footprint for inactive apps rather than how android manages its recent apps list? Is it still requiring special permissions to run non apple apps in the background as active tasks? AI will need to run the background and will need a decent chunk of RAM to do so.
I completely agree that changing the processor or revising NPU or similar is too much to do late stage, I reject that for increasing RAM or storage, both can be changed closer than 12 months from release and I would also reject that apple had the AI changes planned for much less than 12 months out as well. It just feels like a big fuck you to anybody buying a flagship from apple this year as it wont last the length of time it should do for normal consumers who would expect all of the latest AI features to roll out during the supported window.
iOS used to be able to handle background tasks via very specific APIs, that started with iOS 4 and I believe this started to be reworked with iOS 7 and it behaves similar to Android in that background apps are suspended by default. According to an old video by Android Authority, iOS seems to be able to compress suspended apps down to a smaller memory footprint than Android. Both OS allow background services to run, but to my understanding iOS keeps way more control over that compared to Android (although vendor-specific battery saving features probably attempt to do something similar on Android). So in that way, it's still more specific/selective on iOS compared to Android. Prompt (iOS SSH app) uses the location service in the background to prevent iOS eventually killing active connections for example. Still, iOS seems to handle app suspension more efficient than Android (and yes, Android actually suspends background apps as well).
I'm with you that they could've likely bumped all soon-to-be-released iPhone 16 models to 16 GB, but rumors only have them at 8 GB. Makes "sense", as even the iPad Pro and MacBook Air still only come with 8 GB in their lowest configurations.
But I don't buy that them releasing the iPhone 15 with only 6 GB of RAM was a malicious attempt at limiting AI features. Seeing how unfinished their AI stuff is even in their latest beta releases, they were/are playing catchup. It was bad foresight and there are often talks about how internal teams at Apple are very secretive about projects in development, I wouldn't be surprised if the team developing the iPhone 15 knew pretty much nothing about the software plans with Apple Intelligence. It's still a very valid point of criticism though obviously, seeing as you could still buy an iPhone 15 to this day (it's still the "latest and greatest" non-Pro iPhone before the iPhone 16 releases in a few weeks) and you won't get the by far biggest feature of a software update releasing just weeks/months after your purchase. This is a huge step backwards in terms of software support, as iPhones normally get pretty much all major new software features for at least 3 years, and still most features of even newer OS releases (recent devices have seen support for major updates for 6+ years, the iPhone XS will get its 7th major iOS release with iOS 18).
I'm not saying "cut that poor multi-trillion dollar company a break", I'm just saying that not supporting the iPhone 15 for Apple Intelligence probably isn't a result of malicious acting, but rather bad foresight and poor internal communication. Limiting the soon-to-be-released iPhone 16 models to 8 GB on the other hand seems very greedy, especially with them trying to run as many of their AI models on-device.