The new Apple TV has twice as much RAM as the previous model, but apps and games can’t use it

The new Apple TV 4K features an A19 chip inside with 128 GB storage and 8 GB RAM, twice the amount of memory as the previous version. Presumably, the supply crunch surrounding the memory chips is part of the reason this generation of Apple TV box jumped to a $299 price point as well. However, although the specs have been upgraded, apps and games are not actually able to use more RAM for themselves. Apps on Apple TV are limited by the operating system to 2 GB RAM each, and that cap has not changed on the fourth-generation box. Obviously, most of the apps you run on Apple TV are streaming service clients, which generally have much smaller RAM requirements anyway. However, ostensibly, Apple markets the Apple TV as a gaming device and RAM constraints matter much more there. A hypothetically graphics-intensive game will easily hit the 2 GB RAM ceiling, and some fans had hoped that the new box with the new chip and double the internal memory would help here. Unfortunately, with the current tvOS software, that is not the case. 9to5Mac independently confirmed that an Apple TV app is force-quit by the system when it allocates more than two gigabytes of memory for its process. The developer API os_proc_available_memory function also reports a 2 GB limit to the app, the same value as the third-gen Apple TV. It is unclear whether this is an intentional policy decision, or an oversight. Nevertheless, the 2 GB limit is the status quo. Tangentially, it’s worth noting that the 128 GB of onboard storage is also not usable by a single app or game; tvOS imposes app bundle limits of about 4 gigabytes with apps able to reserve about 20 GB extra for some assets. Regarding the unchanged RAM limit despite doubling the internal memory on the chip, there is some speculation that Apple opted to reserve a portion of the system memory to help the performance of the Siri AI models. However, this doesn’t make too much sense to us. The most complex Siri AI features you can do on the TV offload to a connected iPhone or server backend anyway. The same Siri AI features are also available on the prior two generations of Apple TV hardware, so it doesn’t seem like RAM constraints are a meaningful factor. One group of users hoping for more RAM in the Apple TV was the game decomp community, which use AI to get AAA studio games running on anything from an Apple TV to an iPhone. Some of their projects have run into the 2GB tvOS limit previously, and were hoping that the new Apple TV would alleviate that. So far, that is simply not the case. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.