Comment by dgellow

16 hours ago

You want a 96GB RAM phone and only plan to keep it 3 years? I cannot fathom the way some of you live. I have an iPhone SE from 2022 that I don’t expect to get rid of before at least 2-3 more years, meaning it would have been in use for 6-7y at minimum. And it’s perfectly comfortable to use, I’m not forcing myself in any way to keep it longer. And you’re talking about wanting a ridiculously expensive phone and only have it for 3 years? That sounds so wasteful and unnecessary

I couldn’t agree more. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12, bought new 6 years ago. My phone still feels snappy. And it gets me through a whole day with 60%+ battery remaining. The only real complaint I have is that I only have the 64gb model. I need to delete things every time a software update comes out because of how bloated modern software has become. But the hardware is fantastic.

I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?

  • It's about multitasking. RAM is the upgrade trigger for me. I'm so exhausted by developer introduced bloat in software such that almost every app fully reloads when switching. Devs ruin multitasking every few years until another RAM upgrade.

  • You're missing the important bit in the GP comment:

    > the most important property of compute devices right now

    Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.

People sued apple for selling a device with no mention of ram and then apple released the next gen saying "this has more ram, you need to upgrade to it to use the features we advertised for last gen."

How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?

If you keep a phone in good condition, the resale / trade-in value isn’t insignificant after 2 years.

The net price for a new phone then can be considered a relatively inexpensive hobby when looked at from a per week basis.

I’m being hyperbolic. Sharing the amount of RAM seems table stakes with the current demand and failing to disclose it seems like the answer wouldn’t be positive.