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New iPad Pro, anyone think 16gig ram is worth it for iOS music?
Hi, as the title suggests, I’m all set to pick up the 512 storage 12.9 inch iPad Pro. 8 gig ram seems fine but just wanted to see what others thought and if 16 gig is a significant help. Thanks.
I’ll be recording into garageband as i hate every other daw - long time Auria user - and maybe try loopy pro. So lots of aus for me. Might have to bounce tracks to audio in garageband if it can’t freeze. But just anyone experiences or thoughts, thanks
Coming from a first gen 12,9 iPad im quite excited,
Comments
I think 16 is overkill for most music apps, if not all of them.
Nonsense. Do you realize how many tabs you could have open with 16 gigs of RAM?
Depends on how the Ram is used, not?
I counted, it's 16 tabs.
Apple allows a app to use maximum of 5GB ram. Maybe iPadOS 16/17/18 will allow more ram to use for apps, but at this moment 16GB is useless. The main benefit of a M1 is the CPU power, that really makes a difference.
So, buy the 8GB version.
You probably won't see much of a difference between 16GB and 8GB. But, it is possible that you could.
If you run multiple large RAM usage apps at once, like maybe audio, video, and graphics apps at the same time it could make a difference. When thinking about this remember that each AUv3 plugin runs in its own memory space and this doesn't count against the RAM limit for the host. So, using a bunch of plugins can rapidly increase the amount of RAM you use.
A couple of the ways that iOS uses RAM might influence your decision. The first is that if the system running low on RAM, the OS will ask apps to free up some RAM. If the app doesn't the OS can kill the app. The second is that iOS will automatically unload areas of RAM that it knows is on disk if RAM is constrained and other apps are asking for some. So, it may automatically unload resources that an application has loaded and then reload them if the app needs them again when moving to the foreground. That could have some performance impacts in some situations that you would be less likely to see.
Another thing to consider is that most iPads don't even have 8GB. At this point, nearly every app is going to be written to perform well in less than 8GB. If you plan on using this iPad for five or six years, that may change and that 16GB could become a bigger issue.
I didn't need the larger disk size, so I went with the 8GB version. I haven't seen any issues with RAM usage at all. I got the 8GB version of the Mac Mini too and have been pretty impressed with how efficient it is with RAM usage too. I barely ever saw any memory pressure even with huge involved multithreaded app compilations. These things are pretty efficient. And the disk is really fast for when it does need to reload the resources from disk.
I think the old saying about computers also applies to the iPad. Get as much RAM and storage as you can afford because you're trying to 'future proof' your purchase as much as you can. And with bigger and better apps always coming down the road you'll want to make sure you'll be able to run them.
Right now there isn’t really iOS software to take advantage of it, at least that I’m aware of. But as of iOS 15, apps can use more than 5GB, so I reckon that soon enough, there will be apps that use a bunch of RAM.
More is always better when it comes to music and RAM. I always go for max RAM. I’m currently waiting for the new M1 Mac Minis to drop just for the upgrade in RAM.
Now, will you use that much RAM now? Probably not. But if you hang onto the ipad for a few years it’ll pay off. Some people buy new ipads every year as they roll out so its not as much of an issue. My “upgrade cycle” is like 3-5 years for ipads, so I buy the biggest, baddest one to future proof it a little.
Here’s another way of looking at it, if you want the bigger storage options (the 1 or 2 TB), they only come with 16GB of RAM. (in other words, you can’t get a 1TB model with 8GB of RAM for example) The engineers at Apple designed these models with more RAM for a reason.
I think we're still at least 12 months away from seeing apps that will be able to make use of 16GB. On a personal note, I regret purchasing the 256GB M1 rather than the 512GB but the extra 8GB RAM isn't part of that regret. The 12.9in M1 is the most I've ever paid for a tablet device, and it stung. Much as I regret not getting the 512GB, I'm not sure I could justify the outlay to myself if I were purchasing again today.
Thanks everyone. I made my choice.
I went with the 8gb 512
I was set on the 16gb but it’s just a bit too much money
Even this one at over 1500 CAD after tax is kind of crazy for an iPad
I upgraded from 2017 pro… new one feels so light it’s crazy
I wish they would have “pro” branding tho, make them stand out a bit from the pack.
It’s a sweet machine no matter which you choose though.
What's the mechanics of this? If I have 7 apps open in AUM, is 5GB allocated to each individual app, or is 5GB limited to all the apps open in AUM?
You don't open apps in AUM, you open a AUv3. And each AUv3 gets it's own dedicated amount of RAM allocated. So, AUM itself can use 5GB of ram, the AUv3's are limited to that.
@jonmoore : I also got the 256 gig M1 and no regrets. I figured as it has thunderbolt , using an external storage device shouldn’t be a problem. Why the regret in your case? We’re talking price differential of literally hundreds of dollars here.
I had to make the same decision and went with the 8 GB. I’ve read some discussions about 8 vs 16 GB MacBook Air models for music production and my conclusion from all these posts and threads was that there is no difference. People had no problems on an 8 GB machine even with their most complex projects. Without doubt MacOS can fully utilize the M1, so if under MacOS there is no advantage I think there won‘t be an advantage under any upcoming iPadOS version either.
To clarify things a bit here, if you were hooking up apps through inter-app audio or Audiobus, then each individual app could request the max level of RAM on that machine. The max depends on the size of the RAM in the iOS device and you aren't guaranteed to get the full amount. It depends on how much RAM is already allocated.
If you are running AUv3's in AUM then the RAM limits are different. If I remember right, the RAM limits on my iPad Pro with 8GB under iOS 15 when it was being released was about 1.5GB per AU. All the instances of a particular AU in a given host share the RAM limit. If you had 5 instances of LRC5 running in an AUM session, then the 5 instances would have to share that 1.5GB of RAM. This depends on the device too. On my iPhone 6 the limit is around 300MB. On my old first gen iPad Pro it was around 800MB.
None of the RAM used by any AU counts against the host RAM limit because they are separate applications running in their own process space.
On the Mac or PC, plugins are usually running in the host process space, so the allocated RAM is part of the host. AUV3's on the Mac can actually be either in process or sandboxed and running in their own process depending on how the AU is implemented. But that's not the way AU's work on iOS where they are always sandboxed applications.
Outside of samplers or plugins that are really complex, it would be really rare to see any that use a large amount of RAM. As a point of reference with LRC5 again since I know the rough measurements, it uses a max of about 50MB for a given instance when you are manipulating controls. When the view is up but nothing is being manipulated it takes about 22MB. When the UI is closed and the AU is only processing audio it takes a bit less than 12MB. I'd guess that this would be fairly typical for apps that didn't have lots of samples or really long delay times. It would take a lot of plugins to significantly run up against memory constraints. You could do it for pretty big projects, but it would take some hefty amount of CPU in that case too and that would probably be a faster limiting constraint to hit.
Great insight here, thank you! This suggests to me that there might be some benefit to 16GB even now, but it depends a lot on the nature of the instruments and effects being used. IOW there isn’t a single answer to the original question that’s right for everyone (though it also sounds like 8GB is as much as most people would need). I do feel like I’m a bit “future proof” with a 16GB machine but it’s probably also true that if half the RAM in my machine disappeared suddenly, I wouldn’t really notice.
I do wonder if 16GB consumes the battery significantly faster than 8GB.
As with most questions regarding computer configuration options the best answer remains:
IT DEPENDS.
But someone will have an opinion or some useful data. In general, I buy as much capability as I can get. And being married with a tendency to over indulge... what I can get is usually based upon a perceived metric of financial "fairness". Knowing this... I strive to drive up my karma scores to be able to spend more.
For convince sake I want 16GB, 2TB storage, 12 inch screen with the best camera, etc. But for 3 years I have been using a $429 iPad and finding ways to just make it work. The one I covet comes in at $2400 with all the required extras.
I'm always fighting storage capacity on Apple devices since the apps are so cheap I can
keep bingeing over many months below the radar of accountability.
You better get that 16 GB RAM before APPLE changes their mind and discontinues it....LOL!
You remember the headphone jack they took that back too...LOL!
But bro they came back sort of with the new MacBook pros, added back some ports and the MagSafe
I think they just change stuff for the sake of it, then bring stuff back later, make it retro..whatever, haha
— - —- —- -
Buy the best you can afford and make the best of it
I’m loving having an actual thunderbolt port on this thing though. So much better than the lightning.
If you can afford more ram, always get more ram
As much as i love the ipads but minimum is almost 2k € for the 16GB version…nope,i don‘t see the value here.It‘s still a very crippled OS compared to Mac OS and the whole system does not run as stable or flexible as a macbook.And as other pointed out,theres just nothing that can make really good use of the 16GB (yet).I don‘t think this will change in the foreseeable future.
I absolutely love my 8GB M1 ipad though (also having an 8GB Air M1 which is just awesome) I think it‘s top notch and i guess i prefer to replace it in two years with the latest M version for the sake of raw cpu/gpu power and probably having the 16GB as standard entry level by then…
if money is not an issue…of course go 16,no questions/answers needed in this case 😉
I plan to get iPad Pro 12.9 and just wanted to check in on this issue. From what little I’m able to glean, apps can request up to 12GB on iPads with 16GB RAM, as of iPadOS 15. But are there any apps out there that actually do request that much?
Apart from that, is performance measurably better in some other ways? Is multitasking smoother, apps don’t get kicked out of memory as often?
I would have expected someone out there to be kicking the tires and doing some benchmarks, but I haven’t been able to find any so for.
I’ll probably get 1TB in any case because I may find some way to fill storage beyond 512MB, but I’m just curious if this is another case where Apple makes a feature available and developers don’t have an interest in implementing it (e.g. why don’t reading apps support multiple documents and custom fonts?).
I think the main thing to consider is that not many devs/apps are going to be pushing these limits. The number of 16GB M1 based iPads out there is pretty small compared to a regular iPad. You don't really want to cut out the majority of the potential market unless you have to. I've had two iPad Pros now, the original and the new one. I looked at both of them mainly as future proofing. It'll be some time before the baseline iPad catches up to them and devs start to target that performance level.
Yeah I'd say get the 1TB for the storage and be glad to have the extra RAM in case it becomes useful in the future
Overkill probably Apple just wants u money.