Nice article, but I don't entirely buy it. First, just because the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity and Apple may add more multitasking in a future OS release, this doesn't make a straw man out of Apple's argument that third party multitasking is a hamper to stability and a drain on the battery. An app that repeatedly crashes and restarts is obviously unstable and will certainly drain the battery faster, for example. Also, the OS was initially designed for iPhones, which do have some battery issues, and while the iPad does have a honking big battery, you still want it to last as long as possible(especially since it is going to be compared to the Kindle and Nook).
The fact that iP* devices have limited RAM and no swap is also true and another good reason for the limited multitasking, but its misleading to suggest that they don't have swap because they don't have hard drives. For example, there are plenty of implementations of linux on a flash drive which plainly use a portion of the flash drive for swap space. And you can easily find guides for enabling virtual memory on jailbroken iphones. The "Bundles" method of implementing multitasking on Android sounds exactly like the way most iPhone OS apps already work, with the exception that Apple doesn't yet let non-Apple apps run in the background. In the Android OS, apps that were the least recently used get killed, so they then aren't really multitasking most of the time either. Like on the iPhone, when they are wanted again, they reopen to their previously saved state. It's not going out on a limb to suggest that when Apple updates the iPhone OS to accommodate multitasking (or to strengthen the appearance of multitasking), it's will be some elaboration of this scheme, and apps will have to meet some pretty stringent requirements before they are allowed to "multitask". We'll find out soon, Apple is going to preview the next iPhone OS thursday. On Apr 4, 2010, at 6:13 PM, COMPUTERGUYS-L automatic digest system wrote: > From: mike <[email protected]> > Subject: ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained > > Kinda long for our list, but seemed short enough to post here in full. A > good editorial about why the Apple family of pods don't multitask. > > <http://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/why-ipad-and-iphone-dont-support.html?utm_sou= > rce=3Dfeedburner&utm_medium=3Dfeed&utm_campaign=3DFeed%3A+rlove+%28Robert+L= > ove%29&utm_content=3DGoogle+Reader> > > *Why don't the iPad and iPhone support multitasking? The answer isn't what > you think.* > ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
