Apple has officially confirmed an increase in price for all its upcoming iPhone 16 models. A senior-level executive at Apple has officially confirmed that all the four models (iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max) will have an increased RAM sizes up-to 8GB.
Notably, Apple is not usually revealing the details about it internal hardware specifications like RAM or battery size during any of their product launches. Instead, the phone maker focus on the performance and features of the device rather than specifying components.
For this reason, iOS, WatchOS and iPadOS users and the device's analysts often rely on third-party teardown reports and benchmark tests to discover the exact internal-hardware specifications, such as RAM capacity and battery size, to fully understand the device's potentials.
Meanwhile, the confirmation of iPhone 16 models RAM by the phone maker top executive is a surprise. Johny Srouji is currently Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware and Technologies.
He's the one that revealed the RAM size of the upcoming flagships when he mentioned, “Apple meticulously analyzes data to determine the hardware requirements for specific features.” This is a major upgrade for the standard iPhone 16 model, as the iPhone 15 features 6GB RAM. Srouji revealed this critical information while mentioning the need to upgrade RAM sizes.
Apple Intelligence needs more RAM for reliable performance
The Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware and Technologies Johny Srouji emphasized the needs for Apple to upgrade the RAM size of its iPhones for Apple Intelligence.
In other words, the Apple's top executive implied that the company's version of AI, integrated into features like Siri, machine learning, and on-device processing, needs more significant internal memory to operate efficiently.
If the RAM in iPhones wasn't increased, these AI-driven processes could overwhelm the device's system. However, do note that when the device is overwhelmed, it'll potentially slow down performance, cause apps to lag, or even reduce multitasking capabilities.
Hence, the additional RAM is for the purpose of making the AI functions to run smoothly without compromising the overall performance of the iPhone.
We have lots of data that tells us what is going to enable a certain feature, and Apple Intelligence is one of those very, very important features that we want to enable. And we look at different configurations, both for computation and memory bandwidth and memory capacity. And then we make the right trade-off and balance what makes the most sense. So, Apple Intelligence was a major feature that led us to believe that we need to get to 8GB.
Apple's Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is a collection of advanced features set to launch with the iOS 18.1 update, though some of these capabilities may require a paid subscription. For optimal performance, Gen AI needs a dedicated amount of RAM to remain functional and respond swiftly. No wonder even Google’s latest Pixel series smartphones need to reserve some RAM for Gemini.
