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Different iPhones have different published memory 4GB, 8GB and 16GB. The touch can have 32GB. My understanding is this is the off-line memory (disk alike).

How much actual fast ram is there in the device available for my Cocoa Application?

Is there a preconfigured virtual amount?

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Make sure your app doesn't request for more than 40M bytes of memory or some of the early device users will suffer crash quite easily –  overboming Jun 21 '10 at 15:37
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4 Answers

up vote 55 down vote accepted


  • iPhone (June 2007): 128MB
  • iPhone 3G (July 2008): 128MB
  • iPhone 3GS (June 2009): 256MB
  • iPhone 4 (June 2010): 512MB
  • iPhone 4S (October 2011): 512MB
  • iPhone 5 (September 2012): 1GB
  • iPhone 5S (September 2013): 1GB

iPod touch

  • 1st generation (September 2007): 128MB
  • 2nd generation (September 2008): 128MB
  • 3rd generation (September 2009): 256MB
  • 4th generation (September 2010): 256MB
  • 5th generation (October 2012): 512MB


  • 1st generation (April 2010): 256MB
  • iPad 2 (2011): 512MB
  • 3rd generation (March 2012): 1GB
  • 4th generation (November 2012): 1GB
  • iPad Air (November 2013): 1GB

iPad mini

  • 1st generation (November 2012): 512MB
  • 2nd generation (November 2013): 1GB

iOS doesn't use swap space, therefore, only RAM will be available to processes. (That said, iOS does support paging executables.)

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You mean it doesn't support paging memory (to flash in this case). I'm sure that it supports virtual memory. –  JeeBee Dec 16 '08 at 12:30
There's no paging of data, but readonly pages (ie instruction data) will be freed and reloaded as needed. –  Mike Akers Dec 17 '08 at 18:35
Think of it as an OS X kernel without any swap files, it'll still page executables. –  LeakyCode Dec 18 '08 at 8:07
This is probably because unlike a harddrive flash memory can only be written to a limited number of times... before it fails. So this scheme vastly improves memory life. –  AnthonyLambert Oct 16 '09 at 16:27
iPod touch 4th generation: 256MB –  Josh Brown Dec 15 '10 at 3:45
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enter image description hereCurrently released Apple iOS devices have the following amounts of working memory:

iPhone        =  128 MB
iPhone 3G     =  128 MB
iPhone 3GS    =  256 MB
iPhone 4      =  512 MB
iPhone 4S     =  512 MB    
iPhone 5      = 1024 MB
iPhone 5S     = 1024 MB

iPod Touch 1G  =  128 MB
iPod Touch 2G  =  128 MB
iPod Touch 3G  =  256 MB
iPod Touch 4G  =  256 MB
iPod Touch 5G  =  512 MB

iPad           =  256 MB
iPad 2         =  512 MB
iPad (3)       = 1024 MB
iPad (4)       = 1024 MB
iPad Air       = 1024 MB

iPad mini (1G) =  512 MB
iPad mini (2G) = 1024 MB
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Tony - there are multiple versions of the iPod Touch also - you should include those variations as well. Good summary! –  Joshua Jun 21 '10 at 15:39
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iPhone and iPod touch has 128 megs of ram, but 3rd party applications should only count on having about 20 megs available.

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As Mehrdad Afshari says, it's 128Mb (except for the 3GS which has twice that), but why do you need to know? Not all of it is accessible to programs and the exact amount varies. Presumably activities like running iPod in the background saps some memory and OS2.1, for instance, seemed to leave less free memory than 2.0.

The key, application wise, is to cache stuff rather than require everything in memory and to heed the memory warning notifications. Your app will be forced to quit if you don't. (If it quits with status 101, you were using too much memory.)

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because I am writing an application with an in memory database. I will write it in a different way depending on how much memory is available. –  AnthonyLambert Oct 16 '09 at 16:28
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