What do you do with your phone that requires you to know the memory details? Genuine question, I have absolutely no idea how much memory my iPad or phone have and don’t see why I would need to know

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WarmWash 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Running not-particularly-useful local models.

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eagerpace 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because I am buying a phone to use for the next 3 years and want to buy it based on the most important property of compute devices right now. I couldn't care less about the camera and the 13 random metrics that all look the same as every other camera announcement. I will happily take 96GB of RAM in my phone (and I know what that means) and would gladly allow you to make it 1.2mm thicker in the process.

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dgellow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You want a 96GB RAM phone and only plan to keep it 3 years? I cannot fathom the way some of you live. I have an iPhone SE from 2022 that I don’t expect to get rid of before at least 2-3 more years, meaning it would have been in use for 6-7y at minimum. And it’s perfectly comfortable to use, I’m not forcing myself in any way to keep it longer. And you’re talking about wanting a ridiculously expensive phone and only have it for 3 years? That sounds so wasteful and unnecessary

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halJordan 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People sued apple for selling a device with no mention of ram and then apple released the next gen saying "this has more ram, you need to upgrade to it to use the features we advertised for last gen."

How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?

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josephg 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I couldn’t agree more. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12, bought new 6 years ago. My phone still feels snappy. And it gets me through a whole day with 60%+ battery remaining. The only real complaint I have is that I only have the 64gb model. I need to delete things every time a software update comes out because of how bloated modern software has become. But the hardware is fantastic.

I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?

	▲	selcuka 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You're missing the important bit in the GP comment: > the most important property of compute devices right now Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.

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eagerpace an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m being hyperbolic. Sharing the amount of RAM seems table stakes with the current demand and failing to disclose it seems like the answer wouldn’t be positive.

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apetresc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What on earth would you do with an iOS device that has 96GB of RAM? You realize the last generation (i.e, the most powerful consumer phone in the world today) had 12 GB of RAM? You feel the need for eight times that amount?

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lokar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Number go up, I guess? A lot of people derive great satisfaction from ever larger (or sometimes smaller) number. But, uh, 8X is probably too much, need to spread that out over a few generations.

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cortesoft an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They obviously want to run AI models on their phone.

	▲	HDBaseT 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In theory it sounds alright, although in reality, the heat and power consumption make this less than ideal. I am not sure single digit tk/s on weak model like ChatGPT OSS 20b @ Q3_K_M is going to be worthwhile. Not to mention this has to be <0.01% of users who "want" to do this. The iPhone tooling would make it hard to even configure and spin up a local LLM.

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swader999 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ok Bill.

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o_m 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I only care about it because I'm waiting for a MacBook Neo with more than 8gb of memory.

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josephg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane. We should get software working well on those devices, just like it did a decade or two ago.

Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.

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wang_li 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm waiting for a software release for my iPhone 16 Pro Max that will let me plug in a dock that has an attached SSD, keyboard, mouse, and display, and an option to pop up on my phone to reboot into MacOS.

Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.

	▲	josephg an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You’ll be waiting awhile. iPads have had desktop M-series CPUs for ages now, and you still can’t run macOS on an iPad. It’s just a software restriction. I’m sure they have macOS running on iPhones and iPads internally, probably both through a VM and natively. But it’s very Apple to block this use case.
	▲	selectodude 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’m pretty sure the efficiency cores in the A20 Pro have more juice than the performance cores in my M1 Pro laptop.

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hombre_fatal 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To know what you're getting. No further reasons needed.