One of the things Apple never shares and prefers to keep to itself are the RAM specs for its devices. New information on Tuesday reveals both devices come with 2GB of RAM.
First shared by TechCrunch‘s own Matthew Panzarino, who managed to get a hardware statistic app to run on the devices while going hands-on with it, 2GB of RAM is present on both the iPhone SE and 9.7-inch iPad Pro.
Both iPhone SE and iPad Pro 9.7″ appear to have 2GB of RAM. pic.twitter.com/M20ie0rLH7— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) March 22, 2016
This, in addition to the 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s under-clocked A9X processor, may take a serious bite out of the smaller professional tablet’s performance.
Panzarino also shared images of the 9.7-inch iPad Pro running the popular Geekbench benchmark utility, and it shows that the smaller pro tablet has a clock speed of 2.16 GHz, which is down from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s 2.24 GHz.
Good or bad?
For the iPhone SE, 2GB of RAM is a good thing. It puts the device on par with the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, which both have 2GB of RAM themselves. As shown with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, 1GB of RAM just doesn’t cut it, and may cause issues with device performance.
On the other hand, seeing 2GB of RAM on the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is a bit of a disappointment because it’s a shocking downgrade from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which comes with a hefty 4GB of RAM. For professionals, who will be doing a lot of multitasking with large apps on the iPad Pro, 4GB was an exciting number.
Unfortunately, because the little brother of the larger iPad Pro has half of the memory, it puts it more inline with the iPad Air 2 than anything else, and further supports the notion that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro may be an overpriced iPad Air 2 upgrade with a starting price tag of $599and going up from there.
