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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, why are you concerned about 2gb of ram? What do you plan to do on the iPad that requires more than that?

I'm not even sure. I probably wouldn't do anything too extensive. Probably Plex and some light browsing. I just didn't like the idea of limited ram someday causing me issues.

You can't really measure iOS RAM usage to a PC or Android device. The OS handles memory completely differently.

At most you might notice that some memory hungry apps that don't suspend correctly "start over" when switching between multiple apps.

> some memory hungry apps that don't suspend correctly "start over" when switching between multiple apps

Correction: memory hungry apps that don't implement state restoration correctly.

How is that different from how a modern Android manages memory? That's all I've ever noticed from limited RAM for many years now.

Android requires significantly more memory because it’s a garbage collected environment (one of the reasons). Apple’s platforms by comparison have much more efficient memory models, though the developer overhead is arguably a big greater (which Swift has helped to address a bit). To get the same performance on an android device that you would get on an iOS device requires significantly more memory on the android device.

> I just didn't like the idea of limited ram someday causing me issues.

Ignore the specs. Try one out and you'll find that it simply isn't an issue in the vast majority of cases. iOS is very good at managing RAM.

Where it has been an issue in the past is iOS upgrades- part of the reason that older iPads 'slow down' is the baseline RAM starts to be consumed as the OS gets more resource hungry.

Also with the new multitasking features added in recent releases, additional memory becomes a bigger feature add.

Apple gates multitasking features by model, so having more RAM is not a feature add in this case since you do not have control over this.

Plex runs well on the first gen iPad with 256Mb of RAM as does Netflix. Browsing is a different issue. My 2017 iPad is perfectly fine.

Browsing the web?

Yeah, no. 2 GB of RAM is plenty for browsing the web; this isn’t Android where everything less than some absurd number of gigabytes (4? 6?) is useless.

Maybe I open too many tabs at once, but my 5th gen iPad runs out of RAM while web browsing.

I've never once felt like the iPhone browser (mine has 2GB too) lacked RAM.

Same here. The lack of Firefox with extensions is by far and away the single biggest pain point I have with web browsing on iOS, 2GB of RAM doesn't even register.

On the iPhone it's fine, but my iPads have always been constantly reloading tabs and felt like they cheaped out too much on the RAM (or needed a swap system)

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