Oliver Haslam·

Apps Are Limited To 5GB Of RAM Even On The New M1 iPad Pro With 16GB Of It

Apple’s new M1 iPad Pro comes with 8GB or 16GB of RAM depending on which storage capacity you buy. But it turns out you’ll get a similar experience no matter which one you opt for because all iPads limit individual apps to just 5GB of RAM each.

With the 1TB and 2TB versions of the new M1 iPad Pro shipping with 16GB of RAM it was thought that those machines at least would benefit from being able to do some things that other iPads can’t.

That’s something one Twitter user and developer questioned the people behind art app Procreate. But according to the Procreate team, all apps are limited to the same about of RAM no matter what.

Further testing has confirmed that apps top out at 5GB, regardless of device.

There is a big problem with ‌M1‌ ‌iPad Pro‌. After making stress test and other tests on new ‌M1‌ ‌iPad Pro‌ with 16GB or RAM, it turned out that app can use ONLY 5GB or RAM! If we allocate more, app crashes. It is only 0.5GB more that in old iPads with 6GB of RAM! I suppose it isn’t better on ‌iPad‌ with 8GB.

This isn’t actually a new thing and iPads have artificially limited the amount of RAM an app can use for years. But with iPad Pro tablets now shipping with globs of RAM it might be expected that things will change. Or at the very least, that the 5GB limit would be increased somewhat.

With Apple’s iPadOS 15 announcement set to take place on June 7, we could realistically expect something to be changed there. We’ll find out soon enough.

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