iPhone 6S Finally Gains 2GB RAM As Android Flagships Race To 4GB

When it comes to onboard RAM, Android smartphones often come fully stocked. These days, you expect at least 2GB of RAM on all but the most low-end devices. 3GB is common with most flagships, and some recently released Android smartphones come packing 4GB of RAM.

However, Apple has always been stingy when it comes to the amount of RAM included on its smartphones (although it could be argued that iOS memory management is a bit better than what's found on Android). The iPhone 5, which was introduced back in 2012, gave us 1GB of RAM — but the iPhone has been stuck at the same 1GB through the releases of the iPhone 5S (2013) and iPhone 6/iPhone 6 Plus (2014). Apple is now ready to give customers more RAM with the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, as a resourceful user managed to delve into Xcode to reveal that Apple’s 2015 flagships are now packing 2GB of RAM.

That’s still half the amount of RAM that you’d find in a $399 OnePlus 2 (if you can actually get your hands on one), but it should do wonders for alleviating one of the most annoying problems with low-memory iOS devices — Safari tab refreshes. There are few things more infuriating when browsing on your smartphone than trying to copy data from one tab to another only to have your page refresh -- losing the data that you’re trying to enter -- due to a lack of available memory.

Not much of a surprise but Xcode confirms 2GB of RAM for the 6s (and 6s plus), and 4GB for the iPad Pro pic.twitter.com/X8Ym4DtamS

— Hamza Sood (@hamzasood) September 13, 2015

With that being said, given Apple’s reluctance to make as swift advances with RAM as it does with its SoC and other hardware features, it may be another three years before we see the amount of memory on iPhones double again to 4GB, matching today’s flagship Android smartphones. As for Samsung’s recent announcement that could pave the way for smartphones with 6GB of RAM; we have the feeling that Apple will politely take a pass.

Now if only Apple could do something about doubling the 16GB of storage found on the base models of its $649/$749 “flagship” smartphones…