The season for another iPhone is here and it would be safe to assume that iPhone 15 is the series name (we will find out on September 12). There will be upgrades across the phone, be it in the camera department, processor, bezel thickness… you get the picture. But one thing is expected to remain the same — Apple doesn’t talk about RAM or battery. For that matter, the company doesn’t talk about clock speed either.

Is Apple trying to hide something? Not at all. It’s up to you whether you agree or disagree with the reasons behind keeping these figures untold but keep an open mind and read on.

The smartphone industry can be toxic. If I tell my neighbour that I have two turntables at home, he may turn around and throw the figure “three” at me. Oftentimes I am asked by friends: “Should I buy [place any Android brand and series] because it has 16GB RAM over 12GB on [place the name of another Android brand and series]?” Or, “The shopkeeper asked me to buy a phone with 6,000mAh battery over the one with 4,500mAh.”

It’s a world where we believe everything can be measured but somehow smartphone companies fail to offer analysis or make sense of figures. In the Android-versus-iOS fight, the former makes us believe that decisions should be based on things we can quantify. So, a 6,000mAh battery is great, irrespective of what the software does.

On the other hand, think of numbers in the form of money. Money is supposed to make you happy and you could be happy with Rs 1 lakh a month compared to someone earning Rs 3 lakh a month. Quality of life matters.

Go beyond RAM

Good or bad, that’s for you to decide, Apple will not display slides about RAM or exact battery capacity in its slide. In fact, forget spec sheets, there’s no on/off button on AirPods.

Most tech YouTubers chase spec sheet numbers without giving viewers anything around real-world experiences. There is often the emphasis on how big a difference 12GB or 16GB RAM can bring to a phone vis-a-vis whether the software is tuned perfectly. Most Android phones in the budget and mid-range category have the top specs printed in font size 20 — make it even 28 — on the box.

Think of it, we are told that an Android phone comes with triple camera — 108MP main, 8MP ultra-wide and 2MP macro… or in various such combinations. First, 108MP main doesn’t mean anything because more megapixels don’t result in better photos. 8MP ultra-wide without proper tuning can turn in unusable photos and 2MP macro is as useful as an ant in the soup. Let’s not even get into the front camera which, most of the time, cannot even shoot videos at the same level as the main camera on the phone. Yet, it’s all about those numbers on the back, side and top of the box.

Consider the RAM on an iPhone. We don’t how much RAM is in the iPhone, at least not officially. Yet, it runs faster than any Android phone. When the final version of iOS 17 is released in a few days, it will support iPhone XS, which launched in 2018. I don’t think there are any Android phones from 2018 that will get support for Android 14 when it is released in a few weeks.

An iPhone doesn’t need too much RAM because the software is well-optimised. You need to remember something simple about Apple — it develops everything from chip to software, widget to applications, so that the phone can be optimised perfectly.

Now look at Android, which is made by Google. Here’s one company that develops Android but there are a number of original equipment manufacturers or OEMs that deploy Android with their own skins, resulting in less optimised phones. Samsung does its optimisation better than Xiaomi, so you get a better software experience with Samsung but that doesn’t mean Samsung develops any part of Android. You may say that Android offers more customisation, like the home screen or wallpaper but Apple has caught up with that too.

iOS apps are native apps, something tech writer Rene Ritchie constantly points out, so these apps are written in native languages, Objective-C and Swift whereas Android is an “interpreted platform” and Android apps run through virtual machines.

Talk about efficiency rather than numbers

It’s no different for the battery. Apple’s custom system on a chip or SoCs, which we are seeing since 2010, ensures that not much is taken out of the battery. Loads are split between higher and lower cores and everything is managed better with machine learning. So you can get more out of 4,500mAh than out of a 5,000mAh battery. If you put in more battery into a phone, you have to compromise on size and weight. Do you you want to carry a brick in your pocket?

There is no reason to talk about battery capacity. Instead, it is necessary to talk about battery efficiency, how you can get away with doing all the tasks you usually do without having to juice up the battery the entire day. Usage hours matter.

Or consider the missing on/off switch on AirPods. Do you need it? There are wear sensors and accelerometers, which can detect whether you wearing the headphone or not. You don’t have to stress over battery life. You are allowed to forget to “switch off” the headphone. If AirPods don’t detect activities, it automatically goes into sleep. There are no switches that you need to remember.

Numbers versus happiness?

All this doesn’t mean iOS is free of bugs. There are bugs and Apple tries to iron them out as soon as possible. But the overall goal has remained the same since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007 — keep technology simple and accessible. In a world full of complexities why add one more?

If certain models in the iPhone 15 series are announced to come with the A17 Bionic chip, which is reportedly manufactured by 3nm process, rest assured that competition will take a long time to catch up.

While buying cars in the 1990s and the noughties, the talk was around engine size and all kinds of figures. Now all cars have improved performance, so companies are talking about things like cruise control and CarPlay, which add to customer experience.

Numbers have their place in every industry. But don’t let numbers on a box rule your buying choice for smartphones. The point of money is to make you fulfil certain dreams but don’t let numbers come in the way of happiness or emotions.