June 12, 2009, 4:11 AM — One of the standard features of buying a Mac is looking over the hardware specs -- and, if you're buying it from Apple's online store, tweaking those specs to your liking. When your computer arrives, you'll know exactly how fast the processor is, how much RAM it has, what video card it sports, etc. But there really isn't much of an equivalent when you buy an iPhone. Now that Apple's selling two models at once, you can choose between the iPhone 3G and the 3GS, and you can choose how much storage you want, but that's about the extent of it. How much faster is the 3GS than its predecessor? How much RAM does it have? Who knows?
Well, some people know, obviously, from taking the things apart if nothing else. AnandTech has a pretty good breakdown of what's inside both models if you want the gory details -- basically, they've moved from the ARM equivalent of a 486 to the ARM equivalent of a first-generation Pentium. And a leak on T-Mobile's Web site revealed that the new model has 256 MB of RAM (more than double what my Power Computing desktop had ten years ago).
Perhaps more interesting than the raw numbers is the question of why Apple doesn't use them in its marketing. AppleInsider has a fairly detailed discussion of it. The short version is that in truth the iPhone, like most cell phones even at the high end, is based on commodity hardware. As I've noted, the magic of the iPhone is really in the system software and the apps it runs -- so it's those features that Apple empahsizes as it aims to sell the phone. In fact, since touting the hardware capabilities of a device often tempts developers to push those limits, such marketing could actually make it harder to keep the iPhone a uniform platform -- something Apple will want to do as long as possible.
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