Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are just four months old, but consumers have started looking forward to the next upgrade: most likely to be called iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. A new report from Taiwanese website TechNews claims that the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus will have 2GB LPDDR4 RAM. The current flagship iPhones feature 1GB LPDDR3 RAM.
iPhone 6S to be four times faster than iPhone 6?
It may not sound too exciting, but it will give the forthcoming iPhones a major memory boost. LPDDR4 RAM has a much broader bandwidth than the LPDDR3, which is relatively cheaper. According to Forbes, DDR4 has 32GB per second of bandwidth, twice that of DDR3 RAM found in most smartphones including Nexus 6, Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4. More RAM allows apps to launch quicker, especially during extensive multitasking.
The Cupertino company could easily quadruple the current iPhone memory performance by doubling the speed and amount of RAM. But Apple is not adding more RAM just for the sake of bragging alongside 2GB and 3GB Android devices. History suggests that Apple improves hardware to dramatically improve performance of the device. However, LPDDR4 RAM costs 35% more than the LPDDR3. That means Apple’s memory costs would go up with the iPhone 6S.
Considering the volume of LPDDR4 RAM Apple will be buying, it should be able to negotiate a much better deal than a regular customer. According to DRAMeXchange, 1GB LPDDR3 RAM was priced at $8.30 in the third quarter of 2014. Moreover, the iOS 9, which is already under public testing, is expected to get a radical overhaul. Apple is expected to unveil iOS 9 at the Worldwide Developer Conference in June.
iOS 9 to bring some major improvements
The iOS upgrade cycle includes one major upgrade followed by an incremental update. The iOS 5 was a radical overhaul with iCloud integration, iMessage and wireless synchronization. But the iOS 6 launched with little more than Apple Maps. Then came the iOS 7, which overhauled the user interface and operation of the operating system. The iOS 8 offered tweaks and services like HealthKit and Apple Pay.
Going by the trend, the iOS 9 should see a major overhaul in how the OS works. It will be interesting to see, especially as Apple integrates iOS even closer with OS X. Maybe, the company will use some advanced multitasking features to take advantage of the increased memory.
