Android has entered the 12GB era, why does iPhone 13 still dare to use 4GB of RAM?

Android phones collectively enter the 12GB era

This day has finally come. After three years of staying in the 8GB RAM era, the Android camp has once again taken a big step forward. According to Digital Chat Station, the RAM of the fifth-generation Black Shark gaming phone will be upgraded to 12GB. The RAM of the Black Shark 5 Pro will be directly upgraded to 16GB - as radical as the Red Magic 7.

You will find that the flagship phones on the market basically offer 12GB options, such as Xiaomi 12, OnePlus 10 Pro, IQOO9, etc. Unknowingly, the 12GB era has quietly arrived, 8GB of RAM is already the lower limit that the public can accept, and 6GB has been downgraded to the standard of 100 yuan phones.

For smartphones, the benefits of large RAM are obvious. As long as the capacity of running content is large enough, more apps can be kept in the background, so that when switching to the background, there will be no "background killing", and the user experience will be smoother.

In this case, many Apple fans don’t understand: Android has already come standard with 12GB, why does the iPhone 13 dare to use 4GB of RAM, and it is still very smooth. There has never been an accurate answer to this question.

The hardware gap cannot be made up by software

Is it Cook's talent and courage, or is it due to the magical optimization of the iOS system? Before discussing this issue, we must make it clear that the gap in hardware can never be made up by software.

For example, no matter how powerful the cooling system created by mobile phone manufacturers for Snapdragon 8Gen1 is, and no matter how many black technologies are used, it can only change the stability of the game frame rate, but cannot change the energy efficiency ratio of the chip itself.

To put it simply, the heat dissipation added by mobile phone manufacturers can improve gaming performance, but it cannot improve battery life. Similarly, Apple's 4GB is 4GB, and Android's 12GB is 12GB. The real reason why Apple ensures that the iPhone 13 can be used smoothly lies in these three details.

1. Real background and fake background

The mechanism of the Android system is based on a virtual machine, which can be generally described as a "real background". Every time an Android phone opens an app, it consumes the corresponding RAM, otherwise the function cannot be used normally. The mechanism of iOS is a "pseudo background". When you switch apps, all resources are reserved for the foreground app, and the background app is frozen in the form of a tombstone and retained in the memory.

However, what makes Apple truly powerful is that, through extremely complex system design, it makes the "pseudo background" experience almost the same as the "real background", and implements most functions in the most power-saving way - such as push, download, automatic refresh, etc.

Therefore, although there are not many apps that can run at the same time in 4GB, the use of iPhone 13 is no different from that of 8GB Android. Unless you want to open multiple apps in a short period of time, such as playing games, taking photos, and replying to messages at the same time, in this case it will lead to "killing the background".

Second, the benefits of unified push interface

The Android system modified by mobile phone manufacturers does not have a unified push interface. Developers can only "sweep the snow in front of their own door" and design the APP to retain some threads in the background by default to ensure that notifications can be pushed. In theory, an APP will take up about 20MB of RAM. If you install 100 APPs on your phone, even if you do nothing, it will take up 2GB.

How can we make the horse run fast but not eat grass? As early as iOS 3, Apple provided a solution called Push Notification. Push Notification can be regarded as a native application of the system. It occupies very little RAM and runs in the background all the time. It has only one function: push notification.

All apps send notifications to Push Notification, a "middleman", which then pushes notifications to users. In this way, apps can send notifications without occupying RAM, saving hardware resources. This also brings another benefit: the power consumption of daily standby is greatly reduced, and a 3000 mAh iPhone can use the effect of 4000 mAh.

3. The same app, but different sizes

Everything has its pros and cons. The openness of Android has led to the "fragmentation" of the application ecosystem. The closedness of iOS has led to Apple's absolute control over the ecosystem. It is precisely because of this that Apple can easily transform the tablet ecosystem with iPad OS, switch to ARM architecture with M1 chips, and forcibly popularize 64-bit applications with iOS11.

Similarly, AppStore has very strict listing standards, requiring developers to meet very high standards, not only to ensure safety, but also to be efficient enough. This leads to a phenomenon: the same APP occupies different amounts of RAM in different operating systems.

A foreign guy did a test and compared the memory usage of various apps on iOS and Android platforms. The result was very surprising. A certain app took up 300MB of RAM on Android, but only 69MB on iOS. At the same time, most apps took up much more RAM on Android than on iOS. This was the last straw that broke the camel's back.