Whether you’re buying a high-end PC or the latest flagship smartphone, RAM is a precious commodity these days. The crunch in global supply has driven prices to record highs, making it harder and more expensive to get our hands on cutting-edge memory at a reasonable price.

At the same time, the market is pushing AI features on us at an accelerating pace, and, as you probably know, on-device AI tools require a lot of RAM. If you didn’t, the problem is quite simple: local models running on your phone (or laptop) rather than in the cloud have to be loaded into RAM to run at an acceptable speed.

The advantage is that these AI features can work faster, offer better privacy, and often function without an internet connection. Google’s tools, like Magic Compose, Call Notes, and app-aware Magic Cue, are designed to eliminate busywork from daily mobile tasks. Rather than waiting for every request to travel to a remote server and back, on-device models can begin processing tasks immediately, reducing latency and making interactions feel more seamless.

Like it or not, AI is the future of mobile.

Running AI locally also has advantages beyond speed. Keeping models on-device means sensitive information doesn’t leave your phone, improving privacy and helping to keep your data your own. It also reduces the cost of processing every request in a cloud data center, which is becoming increasingly expensive, and allows us to use lightweight AI tools for free.

This, apparently, is the future of smartphones — AI will work for us via everyday language requests rather than manually swiping through menus ourselves. The trade-off is that these benefits require several gigabytes of RAM to keep models loaded and ready to respond at a moment’s notice.

AI is changing smartphone requirements

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

With that in mind, we’re stuck between rising costs and requirements; buying a phone with 8GB of RAM — a previously very safe value — is no longer enough to use the latest and greatest features phones offer.

You only have to look at Google’s recent Pixel product line to see what a headache it’s been sifting through which models can and can’t support the latest AI tools, such as the Gemini Nano 4. Those Gemma 4 E2B and E4B variants are sized at 4.2GB and 5.9GB, respectively, meaning you’ll want a phone with 12GB of RAM or more to house your other apps. Importantly, those requirements are up from the sub-4GB memory required by Nano 3; the most powerful on-device models are becoming bigger.

Gemin Intelligence actually specifies 12GB of RAM as the minimum requirement, along with AI Core and Gemini Nano v3 or higher. Last year’s mid-range and even some higher-end phones with 8GB or less are already excluded from the latest AI tools coming to Android flagships.

Apple and Gemini Intelligence require 12GB of RAM or more.

Google isn’t ignoring budget customers; Gemini Go promises to bring a subset of Assistant-oriented features to lower-end Android Go handsets, but even this requires 2GB of RAM, which phones often only have 4GB to go around in the first place. AI is a step requirement. Google isn’t alone in setting a high bar for its latest AI features. Apple Intelligence originally required 8GB of RAM, meaning entry-level iPhone 15 and older models with 6GB of RAM missed out a few years back.

With iOS 27, that requirement leaps to 12GB of RAM for on-device AI tools, like Expressive Voices and enhanced dictation, matching Google’s requirement for its latest features. That’s not too surprising, given Siri AI now leverages Google’s Gemini technology. That means only the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air currently support the brand’s latest AI features (at least until new products arrive), severing a long-standing tradition of backward compatibility within the iPhone ecosystem.

12GB is the new minimum

Robert Triggs / Android Authority

It wasn’t long ago that 12GB was considered overkill for a flagship smartphone, and it still is if you strip out AI features. Even 8GB of RAM is still technically more than you’d need to hold two or three Android games in memory at once without having to close anything. But we’re not living in that world anymore; AI features are now where most mobile feature development is headed, and they’re memory hungry.

The issue is that AI features like Gemini Intelligence must remain in RAM at all times to stay responsive; you simply can’t load up a large 4-5GB model on demand in just a few seconds. AI phones with 12GB of RAM are closer to phones with 7GB of usable memory for apps and games. However, that’s an irritating loss of memory capacity if you never intend to use AI features.

Whether we like it or not, Apple’s adoption of more powerful, on-device, on-demand Siri AI features with iOS 27 has almost certainly cemented this trend. Even more mainstream phone users will soon become accustomed to chatting with on-device models, making agentic requests, and freeing themselves from button presses to do more with natural language. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Apple's Siri AI solidifies the need for more RAM. There's no going back.

Unfortunately, buying an 8GB RAM phone in 2026 already means you’re obsolete if you want to make use of Android and iOS’ latest and future AI features. Even 12GB might quickly become obsolete, given the rapid pace of change. What was previously more than enough to run all your daily apps and even a game or two at once is now at risk of falling below the minimum requirements in just two or three years.

Whether you’re spending $600 on a mid-ranger or over $1,000 on a cutting-edge flagship to last the next five years (or hopefully more), I’d aim to pick up as much RAM as possible to avoid missing out on the new AI era of Android and iOS. The Android space isn’t short of 16GB RAM flagships at the very top of the market, though you’ll sometimes have to pay more for the 512GB/1TB storage options. Even mainstream options like the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus, and Z Flip 7 ship with 12GB RAM, which will do for now.

Unfortunately, the ongoing RAM fiasco means that picking up plentiful RAM won’t come cheap. Still, it’s undoubtedly springing for 12GB or more if you don’t want to be left out of the latest and greatest mobile features for years to come.