M1 iPad Pro: Apps Reportedly Limited to Maximum of 5GB RAM, Even with 16GB

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/28/ipados-limits-app-ram-even-on-m1-ipad-pro/

by tosh • 5 years ago

21 27 5 years ago

macrumors.com

lasereyes136• 5 years ago

developers are reportedly severely limited in the amount they can actually use.

When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

Lunrtick• 5 years ago

When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

When you want to use 6 GB..

tw04• 5 years ago

When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

I believe around the year 2000 AMD announced AMD64 and Intel spent years insisting nobody needed 64-bit on the desktop. Then promptly got trounced by AMD for years after they finally released an AMD64 based desktop and Intel scrambled to create a netburst CPU with 64-bit capabilities. So, a long time?

rowanG0773• 5 years ago

That is system wide. A far cry from per process 5GB limit. I can't imagine a IPad pro toy app ever needing more then that. All of the things you'd need more for you cannot do on an Ipad.

tomjen32• 5 years ago

How many GB do you have in the computer you are typing on?

I would say the 4gb limit was reached about 4 to 5 years ago.

Remember the pro is Apples idea of a replacement for a laptop and now it has a laptop class processor, why shouldn't it have laptop class ram?

tempoponet• 5 years ago

To illustrate a real-world example of a "pro" use-case: these devices are absolute monsters at processing video. How much memory do you need to edit 4k video? The answer is likely "how much have you got?"

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

When I installed Android Studio.

alunchbox• 5 years ago

When I install Visual Studio.

rchaud• 5 years ago

4K video editing maybe.

zwily• 5 years ago

I won’t be surprised if it’s an iOS 14 limit, and gets raised in iOS 15 at WWDC.

jdlyga• 5 years ago

iPad Pro: amazing hardware, but still limited by software

onkoe• 5 years ago

not sure if i'd call it amazing, but it certainly does its job

rowanG0773• 5 years ago

I'm not kidding when I say that I would pay a literal 3x premium for an Ipad Pro that can run linux.

Google234• 5 years ago

Linux should still be a subpar experience on the iPad. Apple is not going to write Linux drivers for their hardware.

theThreeTuples• 5 years ago

These things are a trade off. Developers should be targeting a platform rather than the hardware. Why would the user be concerned about the app pegging their ram and how to deal with it.

tomjen32• 5 years ago

Yes. It seems to me that Apple really, really wants the iPad to be sold as a computer replacement and likes to think the problem is how powerful the hardware is, which is an issue for approximately 0.1% of their users, when the real issue is that it runs a toy OS.

With Mac OS X on ARM, Apple needs to port OS X to the iPad, otherwise they should stop production.

OldGoodNewBad2• 5 years ago

This limit makes sense for a mobile device. You don’t want some developer using up all the RAM and stomping on other processes like what happens with older generation iPads ALL THE TIME and I’m sure some Apple people got sick of certain programs kicking everything else out of memory.

5GB is enough for anybody, even with 4K video.

andrewmcwatters• 5 years ago

Somewhere at Apple, I swear they have an internal Terminal iOS app. And I want it. It would be one of the biggest “Pro” things they could do.

I don’t want a lot of the incumbent developer tool apps on the App Store. Third-party devs suck at creating good Apple ecosystem apps.

I’m constantly appalled by the amount of low quality apps on the App Store because so many developers fail to either 1. Create good designs for their apps or 2. At least use the Apple Human Interface Guidelines[1] if you’re unable to come up with your own good branding and UI

[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

slownews45• 5 years ago

Uh - these are user devices - don't most users run multiple apps? It seems some kind of upper limit per app is not totally unreasonable. What's the OOM killer equiv on ipad?

M1 iPad Pro: Apps Reportedly Limited to Maximum of 5GB RAM, Even with 16GB

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