Nearly a week after the iPhone 16 series was launched, Apple has finally confirmed one of their key specs.
All models in the iPhone 16 lineup will come with 8GB of RAM, Apple's hardware chief Johny Srouji confirmed in an interview with Geekerwan. Srouji said Apple looked at different configurations, both in terms of compute, memory bandwidth, and storage capacity, before making the trade-offs and balancing what made the most sense, and that 8GB of RAM is enough to start getting Apple Intelligence, which is a very important feature to bring to everyone.
Apple has never confirmed the RAM information on the iPhone.
According to Mr. Srouji, not only Apple Intelligence, but 8 GB of RAM is very helpful for applications, including playing high-end AAA games on the device. Moreover, this number is also optimized for applications. Overall, 8 GB of RAM is the most perfect choice that can be made.
Notably, this is the first time Apple has publicly confirmed the RAM specs on an iPhone. The company typically doesn’t include RAM in its official iPhone spec sheets for one reason or another, leaving this detail to be confirmed through various investigative methods, like benchmarks or teardowns. Even when that happens, the company doesn’t confirm the RAM details.
A few days ago, code discovered in Apple's official development tools showed that all iPhone 16 models are indeed equipped with 8GB of RAM, and now everything has been confirmed. Last year, the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max had 8GB of RAM inside, while the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus only had 6GB of RAM.
The company broke the norm with the iPhone 16 series.
That means these are upgrades to the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, but the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max don't get any more RAM this year. As a result, there's little difference between the standard and Pro models.
The lack of a RAM boost is a bit disappointing, especially since the artificial intelligence (AI) tasks included in the upcoming Apple Intelligence suite of features take up a lot of memory since the processing is done right on the device, so more RAM would definitely be helpful.
This also means that Apple's phones are far behind their Android rivals in this particular spec. For example, the newly launched Google Pixel 9 comes with 12GB of RAM, while the Galaxy S24 has 8GB of RAM inside, while the Galaxy S24 Ultra bumps the RAM up to 12GB.
People will no longer have to wait for a teardown to discover the RAM on the iPhone 16.
However, these raw specs don’t necessarily tell the whole story, as Apple has complete control over every part of the iPhone’s design and architecture, so they can often add optimizations and tweaks to compensate for lower-end specs. Battery capacity is an example of this, with iPhones often offering the same battery life as their competitors, despite having smaller batteries.
With iOS 18 launching on September 16 and Apple Intelligence arriving shortly after, we'll have to wait and see how this 8GB of RAM affects software performance.
