Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | millipede's commentslogin

The things we need to know most, RAM and Memory Bandwidth, are unfortunately missing from the release. Their absence doesn't bode well.

What do you do with your phone that requires you to know the memory details? Genuine question, I have absolutely no idea how much memory my iPad or phone have and don’t see why I would need to know

Running not-particularly-useful local models.

To know what you're getting. No further reasons needed.

Because I am buying a phone to use for the next 3 years and want to buy it based on the most important property of compute devices right now. I couldn't care less about the camera and the 13 random metrics that all look the same as every other camera announcement. I will happily take 96GB of RAM in my phone (and I know what that means) and would gladly allow you to make it 1.2mm thicker in the process.

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?


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.


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.

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?


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.

What on earth would you do with an iOS device that has 96GB of RAM? You realize the last generation (i.e, the most powerful consumer phone in the world today) had 12 GB of RAM? You feel the need for eight times that amount?

Number go up, I guess? A lot of people derive great satisfaction from ever larger (or sometimes smaller) number. But, uh, 8X is probably too much, need to spread that out over a few generations.

They obviously want to run AI models on their phone.

Very obviously you get a Mac Studio for that, not a phone. (Oh, the 96GB Studio is almost $6000, you counter? Imagine how much it would cost in a phone form factor).

You can't possibly expect Apple to take that market segment seriously.


In theory it sounds alright, although in reality, the heat and power consumption make this less than ideal.

I am not sure single digit tk/s on weak model like ChatGPT OSS 20b @ Q3_K_M is going to be worthwhile.

Not to mention this has to be <0.01% of users who "want" to do this. The iPhone tooling would make it hard to even configure and spin up a local LLM.


> the most powerful consumer phone in the world today

According to what? (I don't disagree, just curious)


I only care about it because I'm waiting for a MacBook Neo with more than 8gb of memory.

With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane. We should get software working well on those devices, just like it did a decade or two ago.

Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.


>With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane.

Sure. Right along with Intel Core 2 Duo and Windows Vista.


I wonder how much we could reclaim just by going back to 32-bit pointers. If we're going back to 4GB it should be fine, right?

Yes and no. If I recall, 32 bit windows has a fixed allocation of 3gb for userland and 1gb for the kernel’s memory space. I think 32bit only really works well for memory sizes smaller than 4gb. It might not be worth it, given a lot of OSes are in the process of deprecating 32bit support.

I'm waiting for a software release for my iPhone 16 Pro Max that will let me plug in a dock that has an attached SSD, keyboard, mouse, and display, and an option to pop up on my phone to reboot into MacOS.

Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.


You’ll be waiting awhile. iPads have had desktop M-series CPUs for ages now, and you still can’t run macOS on an iPad.

It’s just a software restriction. I’m sure they have macOS running on iPhones and iPads internally, probably both through a VM and natively. But it’s very Apple to block this use case.


I’m pretty sure the efficiency cores in the A20 Pro have more juice than the performance cores in my M1 Pro laptop.

People who actually care about their money often like to compare competing products and decide which one provides them the best value.

> best value

> iPhone

Pick one.


Ok Bill.

sell another phone with "more than iPhone" and claim is better because "more X" right ?

Based on supply chain leaks, it's pretty safe to assume 12 GB memory with up to 100GB/sec memory bandwidth at best.

The A19 Pro had 12 GB and was around 77GB/sec memory bandwidth for reference. If I was a betting man, I'd say the memory bandwidth on the A20 Pro is the same.


But they said the memory bandwidth was double the previous generation.

And here we are back to the crux. Sure would be nice if the released material was verifiable instead of "trust me shitstick"

Why? What do you do on your phone that makes you care about memory bandwidth?

in 2026? LLM performance, for one.

everything. Faster memory, fast processing, making everything smoother, and you can idle faster.

If I didn't dream it, I think their presentation said something like 50% increase so you should be quite right probably around ~110GB/sec

Rumors suggested a wider memory bus on A20 Pro.

12GB of ram and double the memory the bandwidth over the previous model.

The things we need to know most, RAM and Memory Bandwidth, are unfortunately missing from the release. Their absence doesn't bode well.

Since 1984, Apple has targeted regular people, not spec nerds. You're not the market.


Regular people optimise for silly numbers too.

Threadcount, Watts, cubic inches: different products use different misleading measures.


The joy being gone is the big painful one for me. Talking to colleagues and friends who like slopifying everything, they seem to love it. It's a divide between us and them; they never really liked programming in the first place and only considered it a job.


At my $work, people do this frequently, but instead of it just being insensitive, they have their personal Slackbot responding on their behalf. After I realized I wasn't even talking to a person, I've stopped opening their DMs.


Your response to them is understandable, but surely more communication, not less, is the way to go to fixing the root cause of this problem.


Just need to learn how to exit it now.


Just remember simple

    :!pkill -KILL vim


There are always 12-page tutorials to do it: good ol'e search engines should be able to bring one up!


Just ask ChatGPT.


hopefully Claude will be back to assist with that


Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.


Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials.

But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.


Same. I'm sure there are good things there but most of what I have come across has been trash so it makes a great filter.


same for me on medium, but susbstack not necesarily, they seem to be more focused on the author not like medium


> On top of that comes what is owed to oil companies and suppliers, claims stemming from expropriations under Chávez and the outstanding loans from China and Russia.

It seems like China or Russia would expect to be paid not in dollars, but in Oil Wells and Refineries. Why would they accept restructuring of the debt instead of repo'ing the assets?


If Venezuela used Enron math, then repo'ing the assets could get tricky. Are we sure the same assets haven't been leveraged more than once? Does Russia and China show up with their armies to see who gets it?


> It seems like China or Russia would expect to be paid not in dollars, but in Oil Wells and Refineries. Why would they accept restructuring of the debt instead of repo'ing the assets?

Because a number of those assets are still owned by other countries that paused FDI due to Trump's Venezuela sanctions in 2018-19.

For example, India was Venezuela's largest oil exporting customer following Maduro's election with it's state-owned (ONGC, Indian Oil, Oil India) and private sector (Reliance) majors being given sweetheart extraction deals that India had to freeze due to sanctions.

Brazilian players like J&F Group also did the same thing with Venezuela's ONG industry as did Spanish players like Reposol.

Now that the Venezuela sanctions regime is over, those assets which were continued to be owned by those countries are being restarted by those countries.

The biggest winners of Maduro's capture was basically Brazil, India, and Spain as their companies were able to restart operations minimizing China's near monopoly in Venezuela after the expanded sanctions regime kicked off in 2018 while being nimbler than American players who essentially have to start from scratch.


I expect Russia won't be collecting anything.


Saltwater comes in the air. Just being near it corrodes everything. Both stainless steel and bronze are very expensive. Even if things were made of corrosion proof materials, not everything can be, for strength reasons.


Picking a random orientation depends on trigonometric functions. In order for this to calculate, it would be a lot cooler if it didn't depend on transcendental functions.


You can pick a uniform random orientation without trig functions by first generating a random point in the unit disk via rejection sampling, then projecting it onto the boundary [0].

Of course, using rejection sampling for disk points will give you an estimate for π more directly.

[0] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/CirclePointPicking.html


What other language does it better?


C# / .NET. It was a big differentiator in one of our analysis.


Right, but you should be doing analysis and choosing the right tool for the job. 9/10 or probably more Java projects never need to use FFI because of the sheer size of the Java ecosystem. C# has always needed a better FFI story because its ecosystem is an order of magnitude smaller.


Why not unconditionally trust Bob?


You can, but trivially that strategy is also no better than unconditionally trusting Alice.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: