Comment by MYEUHD
7 hours ago
> had specs maxxed out
Indeed, their 10 year old flagship has 6GB of RAM.
https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_3-7995.php
(for comparison, last year's iPhone 17 has just 8GB or RAM, 9 years later)
7 hours ago
> had specs maxxed out
Indeed, their 10 year old flagship has 6GB of RAM.
https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_3-7995.php
(for comparison, last year's iPhone 17 has just 8GB or RAM, 9 years later)
Yeah I remember buying a OnePlus 7 Pro with 12 GB (!) of RAM like 7 years ago. The processor was also bleeding edge and that sucker ripped. It combined with stuff like termux was so capable that I used it to run all kinds of stuff that makes little sense on a normal phone. The day that phone retired (from drop damage) was heartbreaking*.
* It actually ran even longer after that as various utilities but not a daily driver, but when I didn't have it with me all the time the convenience slowly waned and it got forgotten
That's the phone I was using too. Gave it to my wife a couple years ago and she used it until just a couple months ago when it too suffered a fatal drop. Very sad.
Good phone. I was worried about that pop up camera failing at some point, but it never did
Indeed, that pop up camera worried me too but was never an issue. It survived lots of pocket lint, and even beach sand and was always reliable. I'd easily trade the current "notch" approach on most phones for a pop up camera (assuming similar quality).
2 replies →
Not an apples to apples comparison#. iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.
# pun intended
Of course it's not an apple to apple comparison, the iPhone 7 from the same year was 50% more expensive and had only one third of the RAM (2 GB)
iPhones from that era constantly booted apps out of RAM when you toggled between them, making it really slow to have more than a few apps open at the same time.
These issues pretty much never happened with these big RAM android phones.
I know because I had both and it was night and day. Like going from a netbook to a desktop machine.
plus has memory compression.
FYI, Android has had zRAM support since KitKat, which is from (checking notes) 2013. Same year as iOS.
iOS uses way less ram than android
Common measurements I have seen is around 40%, I wouldn't say way less, but it is definitely less. Still, 3x more for a model in the same year is impressive (and more than needed to be competitive with iOS) and we should give OnePlus credit for it.
Sadly a lot of low-ish to midrange phones are going back or sticking to 6-8GB today, thanks to the RAM squeeze and the efficiency of iOS is certainly helping Apple here. Certainly nobody is going to complain about the performance of the iPhone 17, despite only having 8GB RAM.
In Android, Samsung doesn't seem to suffer as much. You can pick up an S26 here with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage for 623 Euro, which is a nice midrange price. I guess there are benefits if you can produce your own memory.
> FYI, Android has had zRAM support since KitKat, which is from (checking notes) 2013. Same year as iOS.
iOS compresses regular pages, it doesn't need to go through the swap system to compress/decompress them.
This imho should end up having better savings and performance. zswap when it gains support for non-swap usage may close the gap.
> 623 Euro, which is a nice midrange price [for a phone].
How did we get here?
6 replies →
> iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.
Yeah, by aggressively purging all my Safari tabs (and Apps) unexpectedly, during the most convenient times, like when I'm going through a tunnel on the train and my cellular connection is at its best. Still infuriatingly common on my 17 Pro with 12GB of RAM.
Akshully
Regarding memory compression: isn't the use of `zswap` and `zram` commonplace on embedded Linux at this point?
Phones are skimping on RAM lately because of the price spikes due to the AI boom. Phones and laptops are sometimes debuting with less RAM than their predecessors of the same brand.