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 with 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, twice the amount of memory as the previous version. Presumably, the supply crunch around memory chips is part of the reason why this generation of Apple TV box has also jumped to a price of $299.

However, although the specs have been upgraded, apps and games aren’t actually capable of using more RAM for themselves. Apps on Apple TV are limited by the operating system to 2GB of RAM each, and that cap hasn’t changed on the fourth-generation box.

Obviously, most of the apps you run on Apple TV are clients of streaming services, which generally have much lower RAM requirements anyway. However, apparently Apple is marketing the Apple TV as a gaming device and the RAM constraints are much greater there.

A hypothetically graphics-intensive game will easily hit the 2GB RAM cap, and some fans had hoped that the new case with the new chip and double the internal memory would help here. Unfortunately, with current tvOS software, this is not the case.

9to5Mac has independently confirmed that an Apple TV app is forcibly closed by the system when it allocates more than two gigabytes of memory for its process. Developer API os_proc_available_memory The feature also reports a 2GB limit for the app, the same as the third-generation Apple TV.

It is not clear whether this is an intentional political decision or an oversight. However, the 2 GB limit remains the status quo. Tangentially, it’s worth noting that the 128GB of onboard storage isn’t usable by a single app or game either; tvOS imposes app bundle limits of around 4 GB, with apps able to reserve around 20 GB extra for certain assets.

Regarding the unchanged RAM limit despite doubling the chip’s internal memory, there is speculation that Apple has chosen to reserve part of the system memory to improve the performance of Siri AI models. However, this doesn’t make much sense to us. The more complex Siri AI features you can use on the TV carry over to a connected iPhone or backend server anyway. The same Siri AI features are also available on the previous two generations of Apple TV hardware, so it doesn’t appear that RAM constraints are a significant factor.

One group of users hoping for more RAM in the Apple TV was the game decompression community, which uses AI to make AAA studio games run on anything from an Apple TV to an iPhone. Some of their projects have already hit the tvOS 2GB limit and were hoping the new Apple TV would alleviate this problem. So far, that’s just not the case.