The pain point for vanilla iPhone 17 users is a lower RAM capacity. The current Pro models both have 12GB of memory, but the basic iPhone 17 still uses 8GB. People don’t usually complain about it as much because of the rhetoric that RAM doesn’t matter on iPhones, but the way these handsets are priced, 12GB should be the bare minimum. Thankfully, Apple’s aware of this issue, and it’s going to do something about it next year with the iPhone 18.
iPhone users are aware that Apple is slowly porting “AAA” PC games to its devices, and some of the recent titles are the Resident Evil series and Death Stranding. If they want to keep this going, 8GB RAM won’t cut it anymore. Macrumors cited a South Korean publication saying the iPhone 18 will finally get 12GB RAM, the same as other Pro iPhones in the family.
The original source deleted the post, but the details were passed on to other news outlets already. One of two scenarios must have played out. Either the leak was inaccurate, or it was a preventative measure by Apple, taking the post down for secrecy. Anyways, we are possibly looking at a future where 12GB RAM is the default on iPhones.
Beyond just gaming, there’s much that needs improvement on the basic iPhone 17, which having more RAM would solve. Onboard AI processing and multitasking come to mind. These things can also take advantage of better RAM type/size on Apple's latest iPhone model.
The leak says iPhone 18 could bring 6-channel LPDDR5X RAM that has more bandwidth. Apple partners are Samsung and Micron, and they don’t really make 8GB of memory with LPDDR5X bandwidths. That’s another clue that proves Apple might be jumping to 12GB RAM on iPhone 18.
Let’s be cautious about these assumptions, though, since we heard the same rumors for the iPhone 17. It cropped up with the same bog-standard 8GB RAM at the end. It’s a reasonable claim that the iPhone 18 will have more RAM because of their continued push toward Apple Intelligence, but this is too early to guarantee anything.
