iPhone 16 with more RAM? Forget it!

Apple has never had much interest in launching an iPhone with incredible amounts of RAM. After all, while it is now possible to buy mid-range or high-end Android smartphones with 8GB or 12GB of memory, Apple only reached 8GB in 2023 with the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.

In fact, the recently launched iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus continue to “stick” to 6GB of RAM. Bad news for the future, since the many Artificial Intelligence features coming to smartphones require large amounts of processing, and of course, memory.

But, apparently, Apple already has a solution for this!

iPhone 16 with more RAM? Forget it!

Therefore, Apple has always been able to offer high levels of performance with “little” RAM available on its smartphones, because the North American giant controls everything that goes into the iPhone. In other words, whether it was hardware or software, Apple knows what it has in its hands, and as such is (almost) always capable of making an omelet without eggs.

But, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, there really isn’t much to escape. The new algorithms require RAM memory to run the LLM, as well as a good amount of storage to store all the data. This is exactly why several experts point to 2024 as the year in which RAM memory capacity will “explode” in the world of technology, especially in smartphones. There are those who say that the minimum amount is 12GB, and that the recommended amount is a more interesting 20GB.

Still, everything indicates that Apple will maintain its strategy unchanged. Do you know why? It’s simple… Apple discovered a new way to implement AI features on the iPhone.

In short, I believe that Apple will improve the memory a little in the base models next year, while also doing away with the 128GB versions. Otherwise… Everything will stay the same.

Why?

Well, Apple has a different way of implementing “On-Device” AI features, news we published yesterday and you can read here.

In short, Apple discovered a way to use the storage of its mobile devices to run services like ChatGPT, instead of relying solely on the fastest RAM. This means that in 2024 we will see Apple reserving around 15% of the iPhone’s flash storage for Artificial Intelligence.

This is very curious, because this way of doing things could be replicated by other manufacturers, such as Samsung, which also chose not to improve the RAM capacity of its new Galaxy S24 (8~12GB) .

However… This solution is just a transitional one!

There is a reason we have two different types of memory in our smartphones (RAM and Storage). RAM memory is much faster than our smartphone’s storage.

This Apple solution is interesting for keeping current devices within the Artificial Intelligence “wave”, but it is clearly insufficient for the very near future when AI will dominate our lives and consequently all our devices.

I wonder… Will an iPhone 14 Pro or S23 Ultra handle the latest Artificial Intelligence in 2024 or 2025?