You are a designer, you have bought the most expensive iPad Pro M1 to take advantage of the benefits of its 16 GB of RAM, but you notice little difference in relation to the “base model”, which has 8 GB. Unfortunately this is not a sensation, but a reality. Third-party apps cannot take full advantage of 16GB of RAM due to an internal limitation of iPadOS.
The information has been revealed by Savage Interactive, the company behind Procreate, one of the most popular drawing applications for the iPad. «At the moment, all iPad Pro M1s have the same amount of RAM available. If there is more available in the future, we will also make it available, “he said on Twitter.
In other words: it doesn’t matter if your iPad has 8 or 16 GB of RAM. The maximum that Procreate (or any third-party application) can use is 5 GB. This type of application, remember, requires a significant amount of RAM to handle multiple layers, among other things.
The iPad Pro M1 and an incomprehensible system limitation
The iPad Pro 2020 with 4GB of RAM allows handling an approximate of 91 layers in Procreate. The number of layers rises up to 115 in the model M1 2021 with 8 GB of RAM and remains unchanged in the 16 GB of RAM version. This has dashed, at least for the moment, the hopes of designers who expected a superior experience in the more expensive model.
A long conversation on a Procreate forum has also revealed how much RAM iPadOS is allowing to use in the iPad Pro M1. An Artsutdio Pro developer says that after running a series of tests he found that Apple’s operating system only allocates 5GB of memory to third-party apps. «It is only 0.5GB more than in old iPads with 6GB of RAM! I guess it is no better on the iPad with 8GB, “he says.
This means that no application can use all the hardware resources of the new iPad Pro M1. The remaining amount can be used to run more applications simultaneously, that is, to improve multitasking. However, an individual application will perform the same way in the “base model” as in the more expensive one.
The eyes of developers – and users in general – are on iPadOS 15, which could arrive as of June 7 at WWDC 2021. Apple has been talking about the professional use of its tablets for some time, but these types of limitations play against when it comes to actually using them for that purpose.
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