Apple doesn't talk much about its SoCs beyond basic "chip X is Z percent faster than chip Y" comparisons—this is unfortunate, since Apple's new chips are typically as fast or faster than the best high-end chips from Qualcomm and Intel when they're released. One place where Apple has historically been stingy, though, is RAM. Even last year's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus shipped with 1GB of memory, at a time when comparable Android phones were shipping with 2 or 3GB.

That may be changing for the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, according to some sleuthing by developer Hamza Sood. Using a custom app and the iPhone 6S simulator included with the Xcode 7.1 beta, Sood has apparently confirmed that the iPhone 6Ses will include 2GB of RAM, and the developer offers more evidence pointing to 4GB of RAM for the iPad Pro. The iPad Air 2 was the first iDevice to ship with 2GB RAM, and since the new iPad Mini 4 supports Split View multitasking we can assume that it includes at least 2GB of RAM as well (Xcode doesn't included dedicated simulators for the iPad Mini lineup, presumably since any app running on a standard iPad will look and act the same way on an iPad Mini).

This isn't a guarantee that the new iPhones will include 2GB of RAM, but Sood's tool running in the iPhone 6 simulator does correctly state that last year's phone has just 1GB of RAM. It's as close to a confirmation as we can get before we actually have hardware to test with.

iOS' memory management is aggressive about dumping apps and browser tabs from RAM to make room for new ones, which is one of the reasons why Apple gets away with using less RAM in its devices than comparable Android devices. More RAM won't necessarily speed up app loading times or general performance, but there are cases where it definitely lead to a better experience—mobile Safari on the iPad Air 2, for example, rarely needs to eject tabs from RAM and reload them, something that's a problem for 1GB iDevices but especially irritating on the 512MB versions.

There's also some memory overhead associated with moving from 32-bit to 64-bit apps, a transition that all actively maintained apps had to make no later than June 1 of 2015. While the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6es have mostly handled this transition smoothly, a 2GB iPhone will deliver a better experience for longer.

Pre-orders for the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus opened early yesterday morning. Shipping times have slipped for some colors and capacities—as with last year, the 6S Plus seems to have sold out faster than the 6S, either because of higher popularity or lower supply—but as of this writing many models will still be delivered on Apple's official September 25 launch date.