I've finally caved and bought the iPhone 13 Pro. It's brilliant, but while it has more memory than the base iPhone 13 it doesn't have as much RAM as the equivalent Androids such as the Samsung Galaxy S22.
Now, that's not an issue technologically – I've yet to see it struggle under even the most demanding apps – but apparently Apple has bigger ideas: according to a rumour from supply chains in Korea (via MacRumors), the iPhone 14 Pro will get 8GB of RAM. That's more RAM than Apple's ever put in an iPhone.
What's Apple up to?
It's all about the images
The main differences between the iPhone 13 Pro and the iPhone 13 are all about seeing things. The Retina XDR display in the Pro has ProMotion for much smoother scrolling and animation – something I didn't think I cared about until I had it in my phone; it makes the phone feel so much faster – and the camera array is more powerful, with a LiDAR Scanner for Night Mode portraits and other useful things. There's also an extra GPU core to handle the extra load from these features, as well as a 1TB storage tier to cope with libraries of very high-res photos and video.
The more data you're throwing around, the more RAM you need to handle it – and if Apple is adding more memory to the iPhone 14 Pro then the two big assumptions would be that the cameras will be generating more data than they do now, and/or the screen will be higher resolution, requiring more memory for apps.
As we've reported previously the iPhone 14 Pro is said to be getting higher resolution 48MP cameras; moving from 12MP to 48MP shooting is just the kind of thing you're going to need more RAM to handle comfortably. The iPhone 13 Pro already has more ram than the regular iPhone 13 largely because of its ProRaw and ProRes photo/video abilities. More pixels means more memory needed for these same tasks.
It doesn't confirm the camera rumour, by any means. But it certainly makes it seem much more likely – and given how great the camera in my current Pro is, I can't wait to see what the next generation iPhone Pro will be capable of.
