Apple's new iPad 2 comes with 512MB of RAM, double the amount of the original.
The iPad 2 launch is now behind us and we’ll find out soon enough just how successful everything went. But if exceedingly long lines and sellouts across the country are any indication, it stands to reason that the iPad 2 launch will be even more successful than the original iPad. Indeed, some analysts are now anticipating weekend sales close to the 1 million mark while an Apple spokesperson has deemed iPad 2 demand “Amazing.”
The iPad 2 sport a new, thinner design, along with some serious performance improvements. But because Apple isn’t prone to advertising internal specs, we often have to wait until after a product launch to find out what Apple is putting in their devices.
That, said, the original iPad came with 256MB of RAM – respectable but somewhat curious given that the iPhone 4 sports 512MB of RAM. Ahead of the iPad 2 launch, rumors swirled that the next-gen Apple tablet would come with 512MB of RAM.
And lo and behold, the iPad 2 does in fact come with 512MB of RAM. Moreover, the RAM in the iPad 2 is LPDDR2 as opposed to the LPDDR1 RAM Apple used in the original iPad. The result, coupled with Apple’s new A5 chip is even faster performance – which is no small thing given how impressed users were with the speed of the original iPad.
But we can talk about improved specs in the abstract all we want. It’s always more helpful to see how those specs translate into improved real-world performance.
In the video below put together by TiPb, we see that browsing on mobile Safari is significantly improved on the iPad 2.
You’ll note below that 9 webpages are loaded up and tabbed on the iPad and the iPad 2. When hopping around from tab to tab on the original iPad, each webpage is subsequently refreshed as there isn’t enough memory to preserve the state. The iPad 2, now sporting 512MB of RAM however, can save each site into memory and therefore doesn’t require each tab to reload when hopping from tab to tab.
