this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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A great boost to see the full potential of Apple Intelligence.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

So 4gb accessible ram and a 4gb LLM in ram at all time?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

I've been on the Android ecosystem for 15 years, I literally thought this was an onion article.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's supposed to have an article somewhere here?

ads cover the entire screen except a single sentence

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

On this phone (secondary, work only) i decided to live without AdBlock to remind me how cancerous are some websites

Or maybe I'm just masochistic

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

That article reads like the AI wrote it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

decision to incorporate 8GB of RAM on all iPhone 16 models

Does it mean, their top models also have only 8?

In 2024, if you buy a new phone with only 8GB RAM, then this is more like a poor man's phone.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

And yet, I’ve never run into RAM problems on iPhones, both as a user and as a developer. On iOS an app can use almost all the RAM if needed, as long as your app is running in the foreground. Android by contrast is much stingier with RAM, especially with Java/Kotlin apps. There are some hard limits on how much RAM you can actually use and it’s a small fractIon of the total amount. The actual limit is set by the manufacturer and differs per device, Android itself only guarantees a minimum of 16MB per app.

The reason is probably because Android is much more lenient with letting stuff run in the background so it needs to limit the per-app memory usage.

Those apps also use more RAM than an equivalent iOS app, simply because they run on a garbage-collected runtime. With a GC there is a trade-off between performance and memory usage. A GC always wastes memory, as memory isn’t freed immediately once no longer in use. It’s only freed when the GC runs. If you run it very often you waste little RAM at the cost of performance (all the CPU cycles used by the GC) if you run it at large intervals you waste a lot of RAM (because you let a lot of ‘garbage’ accumulate before cleaning it up). In general, to achieve similar performance to non-GC’d code you need to tune it so it uses about 4 times as much RAM. The actual overhead depends on how Google tuned the GC in ART combined with the behavior of specific apps.

Note that this only applies to apps running in ART, many system components like the web browser are written in C++ and don’t suffer from this inefficiency. But it does mean Android both uses more RAM than iOS while at the same time giving apps less RAM to actually use.

It basically comes down to different architectural choices made by Google and Apple.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But 8GB on iOS is like having at least 32GB on Android don't you know!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Depends on your requirements. The faiphone 5 has 8GB of RAM, which is more than enough for what I'm doing with a smartphone.

Oh course I totally understand what you are talking about though, for many users (mobile gamers, people who don't mind google/apple telemetry, etc.) 8GB is a bare minimum.