Apple are the experts here, they define the user experience, they create the software, the hardware. If you don't like the way they do it, then don't buy the device. If you want to create content on a portable device that allows multi tasking, spend a couple of hundred dollars more and buy a macbook.
My parents (now happily divorced) are finally excited about a piece of technology. Can I listen to music while reading a book? "yes" Will it be difficult to use? "no" Can i keep it in a cupboard when i'm not using it? "Yes - but you could also use it as a digital picture frame".
Sold.
That's the target audience. There are plenty of them. They don't care about "multi-tasking", they might care about flash - but that particular ball is in Adobe's court, it's proprietary software and apple can't do anything about it.
How can you state that as a fact and have nothing to back it up? If it's "needed" then how has the iPhone and Touch been able to sell so well? While desirable for several reasons it's obviously not needed.
I believe there is a transition occurring. It is without a doubt that these iPads/slates will take over mobile computing. They will be fully capable of multi tasking and holding battery life. Think about it. Apple has one of the largest R&D departments in the world. You don't think they have a tablet hidden somewhere running OSX. 100% chance they do. The only problem is that its probably to thick and costs over $1500. I like the route Apple has gone. In 2-3 years everyone will see the big picture
I agree, but I have a feeling that the KIndle prices are going to drop within the next 2 months. That's not to say the Kindle was overpriced for the market or still without merit. There wasn't much viable competition when introduced and eInk still has its benefits for a certain type of customer.
I think the iPad's biggest customer may be those forgoing a netbook of bargain basement notebook for a $500 Apple tablet with option for physical keyboard, if needed, for their basic email and Interneting needs .
Agreed, the kindle will have to half in price at the very least. That doesn't negate the price comparison of these devices at launch - kindle DX - $489 [eReader with 3G for downloading new books only], iPad - $499 [e-reader, video, music, video, internet, email, photo presentation, App Store, N+ wireless networking]. This direct comparison negates all the stupid comments about what this product can't do. It can do what Apple intended it to do. If people don't like that, then don't buy it - it's really that simple.
This isn't for anything more than basic email and internet needs. Most of the target market will use this an eReader and music device cause the iPod touch is too small for them. That they can check email and browse the web is just the icing on the cake (professionals at home who don't wanna work at home, the older generation who are confused by computers etc. will love this thing].
iWork on this thing is pretty, but professionals aren't going to use this (or iWork) for serious output, that's an attempt at productivity which, frankly, dilutes the very clear purpose this device should have. (I think demo-ing it was a mistake, and it should have been left out to retain clarity of message in the keynote). For work - a laptop or desktop, for play - the iPad. Simples.
One final thing - this has more pixels on it than my 12" samsung netbook. The netbook is slow, fugly and can't do anything well in it's 2 hour batter life, it's a constant compromise, and it was a bad purchase. The iPad is not a netbook replacement, it is something new, something better.
The major flaw with you logic is that you think you know what everage user want instead of asking you make assumptions. Apple is in denial mode and that means multitasking is coming. iPad is perfect for my father and his is not tech guy, but even he said that this is BS.
Except you are the one making assumptions about the average user's wants, not me, which you further demonstrate by using your father as an example as the average user.
Nope, it's a statement of fact. The biggest selling smartphone on the planet is the iPhone, the biggest selling portable audio player the iPod. So when people state that this device is simply an enlarged iPod Touch, then why on earth would that be seen as something bad? It's got more power and better features than the iPod touch, so where's the issue?
How many people use Spotify or Pandora to stream music on their iTouch/iPhone? Not many. Most people just sync in music from iTunes.
Spotify isn't available for most markets, and not for large markets such as the US, Japan and Germany. Spotify have 250k paying customers that can use Spotify in iPhone (and Android which supports multitasking) and I think that they'd get a lot more if Spotify could multitask on the iPhone. Spotify is really popular here in Sweden with probably approaching or even exceeding a million users. It's pretty well known that Spotify on iPhone isn't all what it could be, and that it's Apple's fault.
Apple should provide some functinality for apps like Spotify, Pandora, and Skype to run in the background, preferably via some API/service/daemon of their own design so they can keep control over resource management. Why not use the same facilities as iTunes and the Phone applications use? Essentially making Spotify a plugin to iTunes (I wouldn't mind that on OSX either..).
You have stated not one hypothesis to that regard. You've just bellyached and blathered that it needs it and using music streaming and your father as your only arguments.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Povilas
Fanboyism at it's best.
...and you just lost any credibility you might have in a healthy debate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by azzurri
You don't think they have a tablet hidden somewhere running [Mac] OSX. 100% chance they do. The only problem is that its probably to thick and costs over $1500. I like the route Apple has gone. In 2-3 years everyone will see the big picture
I don't think so. Mac OS X's UI doesn't work well at all on a netbook. A 10" display of my MSI WInd was simply to small for prolonged computing. If it had a 4:3 display like the iPad?which allows for more screen area and height?than a 16:10 display it would have been better, but I think only marginally, at best.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nkhm
One final thing - this has more pixels on it than my 12" samsung netbook. The netbook is slow, fugly and can't do anything well in it's 2 hour batter life, it's a constant compromise, and it was a bad purchase. The iPad is not a netbook replacement, it is something new, something better.
Netbooks in general have exceptionally poor display panels and backlighting. Surely it brings down the cost, but it almost seems like a requirement for the device category. The exception to this rule, while still being in the price category is Asus Eee PC 1005HA. I haven't seen it up close and personal, but I trust AnandTech's reviews of these things.
What exactly do you need to multitask? People keep saying that but take a moment and think about it in a practical sense. Are you going to play a game while listening to music... editing a document and watching porn.... all on a 9.3" touch screen. From what I've watched... I see all the Apps open instantly on tap. Within a micro second you are doing whatever you want to. If you need to multitask in the true sense you use a laptop or a desktop. I'd rather have 10 hours of battery life than multitasking on the iPad. I'm sure eventually true multi-tasking will arrive on such a mobile device but defiantly not to sacrifice battery and performance.
In the USA paper isn't A4 it's US Letter. the A B etc. paper sizes are European and not used here, we still have inches and F° Temp and no decent Health care
If you substitute the word 'Global' instead of 'European' you are even closer to the mark.
Back on the subject of the A4 SoC, which is more interesting and certainly more significant than the preceding several pages of flaming, I see no reason to assume that its processor section is necessarily multicore, much less 4-core. The ARM A9, which of course may or may not be the actual microprocessor in the A4, exists in both single and multicore versions. Even the single core version is multi-threaded, although even that isn't strictly necessary for multitasking—but it helps. A multicore processor isn't strictly needed for what the iPhone OS does at present. AI has for some reason chosen to show the block diagram of a 4-core A9 in this article, but there's been no evidence at all presented so far to support that. Apple, of course, isn't saying...
Regarding ARM, it's a British company in which Apple has long been an investor. Apple already licenses ARM processor designs for Samsung to build into SoCs for the iPhone. Here's ARM's (rather junky looking) web site: http://www.arm.com/. As far as I know ARM is a fabless design house only, as is Apple's PA semi.
Apple's decision not to allow third party multitasking in the iPhone OS is enforced by keeping the required APIs private and not available to developers. To enable multitasking they'd also have to provide some kind of UI to control app switching. All this is of course possible, but it's not without consequences for responsiveness and battery life. It seems reasonable to imagine that Apple will offer a greater degree of multitasking in future, but predicting what Apple wants to do is an uncertain business.
yeah all this multitasking talk is SO DAMN BORING, and moronic. Sure some minimal extra app running in the background would be nice if not essential. But launch speed is more important. And all you guys blathering on about IM and facebook and all that crap. I got two word for you: push notification. Set the damn push for your facebook and im, and as soon as you get that message/notification etc. go there and chat, why would you need to chat whilst watching a video or doing work in pages is beyond me. Like others have set both the iphone and the ipads will be quick to save states in the apps they are and instant switching between them will be better than draining your battery and leaving 4 apps open at the same time and then coming here and whining how apple hasn't managed to power a 10 inch ips led screen, with ipod playing in the background, and videos, and all for more than at least 48 hours non stop.
More interesting by far is to see what pa semi has brought to the table and if they implemented on of their custom chips like the powervr, or they ditched them altogether to customise an arm cpu for os x focused tec like open cl and grand central, and optimised the cpu core in general. So far we know almost nothing about all this, apple is (understandable tight lipped), so everyone is speculating. I am speculating too that this might be a modified arm and not a powervr, since despite their low thermal envelopes they were not that low, plus a lot of it was propriety to the the military, so we might not see some of these designed licensed to apple.
And I have received texts while playing geoDefense. You get a nice alert that allows you to reply or ignore. If you choose to reply, then you are taken to the SMS app. When you're done you can just launch geoDefense again and continue your game. What's the problem??
There are actually several problems with this.
1. You can't truly ignore an alert. It pops up in front of the running application, requiring you to acknowledge it. This is bad UI design. There should be a notification tray, maybe in the status bar, that allows you to react to an alert whenever you want to.
2. Startup time. To get back to where you left off, you first need to find the app you were using again (either by scrolling through pages of apps or by typing the name of the app in search). Then you need to wait until the app has fully loaded. This may not be a big deal for many apps, but some take more than 10s to start. It's a bad experience, especially for a device that is often used for short periods of time, and therefore should be quick at what it does.
3. Some apps don't continue exactly where you left off. You could argue that it's bad programming, but that's simply the way it is.
Back on the subject of the A4 SoC, which is more interesting and certainly more significant than the preceding several pages of flaming, I see no reason to assume that its processor section is necessarily multicore, much less 4-core.
Well, the source that AI is quoting is stating that its a Cortex-A9 MPCore-based SoC, and those are at least dual core. And Bright Side of News is the only one really claiming to know stuff. All others are just speculation. But the fact that they got the GPU completely wrong, their claim of CPU must be put in that context. For what it's worth, Bright Side of News, have now corrected some stuff in their article so it doesn't include factual errors, like that the iPad would use Mali-50. But it still contains other errors, like that Snapdragon and Tegra is using Cortex-A9 (they are using Cortex-A8). It might be right that A4 use Cortex-A9 MPCore... It's likely but we don't know.
Before this event, I would have put my money on a core with a pipeline that P.A. Semi had built from scratch. Just like what they did with their PWRFicient PowerPC processors. this being their first product, they might have opted for an existing core though, That makes sense too.
1. You can't truly ignore an alert. It pops up in front of the running application, requiring you to acknowledge it. This is bad UI design. There should be a notification tray, maybe in the status bar, that allows you to react to an alert whenever you want to.
Agreed, the notification system on the iPhone is due for the biggest overhaul.
The system needs a way of aggregating such notifications and presenting a summary.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Treefoot
2. Startup time. To get back to where you left off, you first need to find the app you were using again (either by scrolling through pages of apps or by typing the name of the app in search). Then you need to wait until the app has fully loaded. This may not be a big deal for many apps, but some take more than 10s to start. It's a bad experience, especially for a device that is often used for short periods of time, and therefore should be quick at what it does.
3. Some apps don't continue exactly where you left off. You could argue that it's bad programming, but that's simply the way it is.
Instant resumption of tasks is really desirable.
But as I explained earlier, this does not need multi-tasking. Specifically it does not need apps to run in background. It would be entirely the *wrong* behavior if games continued to run while you answered a text.
It just needs the OS to be able to suspend and resume applications.
The OS is OS X underneath, which is a certified UNIX. So saying it "doesn't multitask" is ridiculous. As a developer, I can tell you that it obviously does - the OS has probably 50+ tasks bobbing in and out of execution at all times, just as in the desktop version.
As far as not allowing 3rd-party apps to be switched out of the foreground, that's been explained here. You absolutely do not want 20 apps launched and not quit, which are then all downloading RSS feeds or photos or pinging servers or even continuing to run their graphics loops in the background.
I can tell you that even ONE busy background task is enough to slow down the main thread on an iPod touch.
Now as far as multi-core, it's true that threads don't care how many cores there are. But if a single-core chip doesn't have the performance to do two intensive tasks without one affecting the other, then separate cores solves the problem. An example:
- You have a word game app that needs to load a 9 MB dictionary or word list at startup. There is no way to load part of it, because you don't know what part will be used first. And loading it lazily (depending on what is asked for) destroys the "instant response" feature of your game.
- So, on launch you don't want to make the user wait 10 seconds looking at a "loading.. please wait..." screen before he can enter some text to look up. So you want the GUI to let him type into a text field WHILE the word list is being loaded in another thread.
- This turns out to be easy using NSOperationQueue, especially since the threads don't rely on each other except that the word list has to be loaded before you let the user hit "Lookup" - the word list isn't needed WHILE the user is just typing the text in.
- Now doing this on a gen 1 touch significantly delays the appearance of the keyboard when the user taps it - thus showing that the processor in the touch isn't up to the task.
- But if the touch had TWO cores, it could easily dedicate one to the GUI and the other to loading the file off the disk and the user responsiveness would be fine.
- I imagine with the performance of this new A4 chip, a single core would do fine compared to the ARM chip in the touch.
- Given that Snow Leopard has Grand Central in it, and that high-level multitasking APIs such as NSOperationQueue already use GC, multi-core has to be in the cards, if it's not already on the chip.
So anyone who says the OS doesn't multitask has no idea what the word means.
Perhaps the app we are talking about, is not a music player, but a videogame. It uses all the resources available and then some. It wants to continue to play music and render graphics in background. Should it be allowed to do so? Who decides?
You are talking about things that already has been solved. The OS manages foreground and background processes. If the system need more memory, it sends notification to background process to close. E.g. look at the Android application life cycle
Also the OS decreases priority for background threads - it saves more processor time for foreground threads. It prevents the devices from locking up by background application
Comments
My parents (now happily divorced) are finally excited about a piece of technology. Can I listen to music while reading a book? "yes" Will it be difficult to use? "no" Can i keep it in a cupboard when i'm not using it? "Yes - but you could also use it as a digital picture frame".
Sold.
That's the target audience. There are plenty of them. They don't care about "multi-tasking", they might care about flash - but that particular ball is in Adobe's court, it's proprietary software and apple can't do anything about it.
1)
3) Making any and all apps run in the background and require a Task Manager to shut off is not "the right way".
There are more elegant ways.
How can you state that as a fact and have nothing to back it up? If it's "needed" then how has the iPhone and Touch been able to sell so well? While desirable for several reasons it's obviously not needed.
Fanboyism at it's best.
I agree, but I have a feeling that the KIndle prices are going to drop within the next 2 months. That's not to say the Kindle was overpriced for the market or still without merit. There wasn't much viable competition when introduced and eInk still has its benefits for a certain type of customer.
I think the iPad's biggest customer may be those forgoing a netbook of bargain basement notebook for a $500 Apple tablet with option for physical keyboard, if needed, for their basic email and Interneting needs .
Agreed, the kindle will have to half in price at the very least. That doesn't negate the price comparison of these devices at launch - kindle DX - $489 [eReader with 3G for downloading new books only], iPad - $499 [e-reader, video, music, video, internet, email, photo presentation, App Store, N+ wireless networking]. This direct comparison negates all the stupid comments about what this product can't do. It can do what Apple intended it to do. If people don't like that, then don't buy it - it's really that simple.
This isn't for anything more than basic email and internet needs. Most of the target market will use this an eReader and music device cause the iPod touch is too small for them. That they can check email and browse the web is just the icing on the cake (professionals at home who don't wanna work at home, the older generation who are confused by computers etc. will love this thing].
iWork on this thing is pretty, but professionals aren't going to use this (or iWork) for serious output, that's an attempt at productivity which, frankly, dilutes the very clear purpose this device should have. (I think demo-ing it was a mistake, and it should have been left out to retain clarity of message in the keynote). For work - a laptop or desktop, for play - the iPad. Simples.
One final thing - this has more pixels on it than my 12" samsung netbook. The netbook is slow, fugly and can't do anything well in it's 2 hour batter life, it's a constant compromise, and it was a bad purchase. The iPad is not a netbook replacement, it is something new, something better.
The major flaw with you logic is that you think you know what everage user want instead of asking you make assumptions. Apple is in denial mode and that means multitasking is coming. iPad is perfect for my father and his is not tech guy, but even he said that this is BS.
Except you are the one making assumptions about the average user's wants, not me, which you further demonstrate by using your father as an example as the average user.
Fanboyism at it's best.
Nope, it's a statement of fact. The biggest selling smartphone on the planet is the iPhone, the biggest selling portable audio player the iPod. So when people state that this device is simply an enlarged iPod Touch, then why on earth would that be seen as something bad? It's got more power and better features than the iPod touch, so where's the issue?
How many people use Spotify or Pandora to stream music on their iTouch/iPhone? Not many. Most people just sync in music from iTunes.
Spotify isn't available for most markets, and not for large markets such as the US, Japan and Germany. Spotify have 250k paying customers that can use Spotify in iPhone (and Android which supports multitasking) and I think that they'd get a lot more if Spotify could multitask on the iPhone. Spotify is really popular here in Sweden with probably approaching or even exceeding a million users. It's pretty well known that Spotify on iPhone isn't all what it could be, and that it's Apple's fault.
Apple should provide some functinality for apps like Spotify, Pandora, and Skype to run in the background, preferably via some API/service/daemon of their own design so they can keep control over resource management. Why not use the same facilities as iTunes and the Phone applications use? Essentially making Spotify a plugin to iTunes (I wouldn't mind that on OSX either..).
Just a thought.
There are more elegant ways.
You have stated not one hypothesis to that regard. You've just bellyached and blathered that it needs it and using music streaming and your father as your only arguments.
Fanboyism at it's best.
...and you just lost any credibility you might have in a healthy debate.
You don't think they have a tablet hidden somewhere running [Mac] OSX. 100% chance they do. The only problem is that its probably to thick and costs over $1500. I like the route Apple has gone. In 2-3 years everyone will see the big picture
I don't think so. Mac OS X's UI doesn't work well at all on a netbook. A 10" display of my MSI WInd was simply to small for prolonged computing. If it had a 4:3 display like the iPad?which allows for more screen area and height?than a 16:10 display it would have been better, but I think only marginally, at best.
One final thing - this has more pixels on it than my 12" samsung netbook. The netbook is slow, fugly and can't do anything well in it's 2 hour batter life, it's a constant compromise, and it was a bad purchase. The iPad is not a netbook replacement, it is something new, something better.
Netbooks in general have exceptionally poor display panels and backlighting. Surely it brings down the cost, but it almost seems like a requirement for the device category. The exception to this rule, while still being in the price category is Asus Eee PC 1005HA. I haven't seen it up close and personal, but I trust AnandTech's reviews of these things.
I would've thought A4 was referring to a sheet of paper, and Apple meant it for the iPad, so it fits perfectly. But I could be wrong...
Seems to me that Steve must likes Audis. He's probably got a customized R8 5.2 just for driving to the office. A steal at around $165k.
What exactly do you need to multitask? People keep saying that but take a moment and think about it in a practical sense. Are you going to play a game while listening to music... editing a document and watching porn.... all on a 9.3" touch screen. From what I've watched... I see all the Apps open instantly on tap. Within a micro second you are doing whatever you want to. If you need to multitask in the true sense you use a laptop or a desktop. I'd rather have 10 hours of battery life than multitasking on the iPad. I'm sure eventually true multi-tasking will arrive on such a mobile device but defiantly not to sacrifice battery and performance.
It's always the same lame answer... Pandora.
In the USA paper isn't A4 it's US Letter. the A B etc. paper sizes are European and not used here, we still have inches and F° Temp and no decent Health care
If you substitute the word 'Global' instead of 'European' you are even closer to the mark.
Regarding ARM, it's a British company in which Apple has long been an investor. Apple already licenses ARM processor designs for Samsung to build into SoCs for the iPhone. Here's ARM's (rather junky looking) web site: http://www.arm.com/. As far as I know ARM is a fabless design house only, as is Apple's PA semi.
Apple's decision not to allow third party multitasking in the iPhone OS is enforced by keeping the required APIs private and not available to developers. To enable multitasking they'd also have to provide some kind of UI to control app switching. All this is of course possible, but it's not without consequences for responsiveness and battery life. It seems reasonable to imagine that Apple will offer a greater degree of multitasking in future, but predicting what Apple wants to do is an uncertain business.
Crazy people.
No, more like a stupid reply from you.
More interesting by far is to see what pa semi has brought to the table and if they implemented on of their custom chips like the powervr, or they ditched them altogether to customise an arm cpu for os x focused tec like open cl and grand central, and optimised the cpu core in general. So far we know almost nothing about all this, apple is (understandable tight lipped), so everyone is speculating. I am speculating too that this might be a modified arm and not a powervr, since despite their low thermal envelopes they were not that low, plus a lot of it was propriety to the the military, so we might not see some of these designed licensed to apple.
And I have received texts while playing geoDefense. You get a nice alert that allows you to reply or ignore. If you choose to reply, then you are taken to the SMS app. When you're done you can just launch geoDefense again and continue your game. What's the problem??
There are actually several problems with this.
1. You can't truly ignore an alert. It pops up in front of the running application, requiring you to acknowledge it. This is bad UI design. There should be a notification tray, maybe in the status bar, that allows you to react to an alert whenever you want to.
2. Startup time. To get back to where you left off, you first need to find the app you were using again (either by scrolling through pages of apps or by typing the name of the app in search). Then you need to wait until the app has fully loaded. This may not be a big deal for many apps, but some take more than 10s to start. It's a bad experience, especially for a device that is often used for short periods of time, and therefore should be quick at what it does.
3. Some apps don't continue exactly where you left off. You could argue that it's bad programming, but that's simply the way it is.
Back on the subject of the A4 SoC, which is more interesting and certainly more significant than the preceding several pages of flaming, I see no reason to assume that its processor section is necessarily multicore, much less 4-core.
Well, the source that AI is quoting is stating that its a Cortex-A9 MPCore-based SoC, and those are at least dual core. And Bright Side of News is the only one really claiming to know stuff. All others are just speculation. But the fact that they got the GPU completely wrong, their claim of CPU must be put in that context. For what it's worth, Bright Side of News, have now corrected some stuff in their article so it doesn't include factual errors, like that the iPad would use Mali-50. But it still contains other errors, like that Snapdragon and Tegra is using Cortex-A9 (they are using Cortex-A8). It might be right that A4 use Cortex-A9 MPCore... It's likely but we don't know.
Before this event, I would have put my money on a core with a pipeline that P.A. Semi had built from scratch. Just like what they did with their PWRFicient PowerPC processors. this being their first product, they might have opted for an existing core though, That makes sense too.
There are actually several problems with this.
1. You can't truly ignore an alert. It pops up in front of the running application, requiring you to acknowledge it. This is bad UI design. There should be a notification tray, maybe in the status bar, that allows you to react to an alert whenever you want to.
Agreed, the notification system on the iPhone is due for the biggest overhaul.
The system needs a way of aggregating such notifications and presenting a summary.
2. Startup time. To get back to where you left off, you first need to find the app you were using again (either by scrolling through pages of apps or by typing the name of the app in search). Then you need to wait until the app has fully loaded. This may not be a big deal for many apps, but some take more than 10s to start. It's a bad experience, especially for a device that is often used for short periods of time, and therefore should be quick at what it does.
3. Some apps don't continue exactly where you left off. You could argue that it's bad programming, but that's simply the way it is.
Instant resumption of tasks is really desirable.
But as I explained earlier, this does not need multi-tasking. Specifically it does not need apps to run in background. It would be entirely the *wrong* behavior if games continued to run while you answered a text.
It just needs the OS to be able to suspend and resume applications.
C.
The OS is OS X underneath, which is a certified UNIX. So saying it "doesn't multitask" is ridiculous. As a developer, I can tell you that it obviously does - the OS has probably 50+ tasks bobbing in and out of execution at all times, just as in the desktop version.
As far as not allowing 3rd-party apps to be switched out of the foreground, that's been explained here. You absolutely do not want 20 apps launched and not quit, which are then all downloading RSS feeds or photos or pinging servers or even continuing to run their graphics loops in the background.
I can tell you that even ONE busy background task is enough to slow down the main thread on an iPod touch.
Now as far as multi-core, it's true that threads don't care how many cores there are. But if a single-core chip doesn't have the performance to do two intensive tasks without one affecting the other, then separate cores solves the problem. An example:
- You have a word game app that needs to load a 9 MB dictionary or word list at startup. There is no way to load part of it, because you don't know what part will be used first. And loading it lazily (depending on what is asked for) destroys the "instant response" feature of your game.
- So, on launch you don't want to make the user wait 10 seconds looking at a "loading.. please wait..." screen before he can enter some text to look up. So you want the GUI to let him type into a text field WHILE the word list is being loaded in another thread.
- This turns out to be easy using NSOperationQueue, especially since the threads don't rely on each other except that the word list has to be loaded before you let the user hit "Lookup" - the word list isn't needed WHILE the user is just typing the text in.
- Now doing this on a gen 1 touch significantly delays the appearance of the keyboard when the user taps it - thus showing that the processor in the touch isn't up to the task.
- But if the touch had TWO cores, it could easily dedicate one to the GUI and the other to loading the file off the disk and the user responsiveness would be fine.
- I imagine with the performance of this new A4 chip, a single core would do fine compared to the ARM chip in the touch.
- Given that Snow Leopard has Grand Central in it, and that high-level multitasking APIs such as NSOperationQueue already use GC, multi-core has to be in the cards, if it's not already on the chip.
So anyone who says the OS doesn't multitask has no idea what the word means.
But uses little resources according to who?
Perhaps the app we are talking about, is not a music player, but a videogame. It uses all the resources available and then some. It wants to continue to play music and render graphics in background. Should it be allowed to do so? Who decides?
You are talking about things that already has been solved. The OS manages foreground and background processes. If the system need more memory, it sends notification to background process to close. E.g. look at the Android application life cycle
Also the OS decreases priority for background threads - it saves more processor time for foreground threads. It prevents the devices from locking up by background application