7 ms·

Apple to preview iPhone OS 4 this Thursday at Apple HQ

57 points by anderzole 17y ago

theBobMcCormick 17y ago
If they announce multitasking for 3rd party apps, it's gonna put a really entertaining new twist on this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171 :-)
- martythemaniak 17y ago
  Obvious Prediction: All the people that have been vehemently defending Apple's lack of multitasking will very smoothly switch to extolling the virtues of this new feature, and how its way better than Android/BB/whatever.
  - mcav 17y ago
    People who defend single-tasking do so because multitasking can cause problems w/r/t memory, performance, and battery life. If Apple releases a solution that doesn't suffer from those issues, there's absolutely nothing wrong with "extolling the virtues" of multitasking. My money's on some sort of limited form of multitasking, where apps can launch background processes or something like that.
    - martythemaniak 17y ago
      I don't think you've been following the conversation very well. When people bring up the iPhone's lack of multitasking (I've done this often in the past), most people will not say something reasonable like "Yes, you're right. It's a weakness of the platform that they should address". No, most of the time its a story about how lack of multitasking is GOOD and how the other platforms are bad for offering it, how users are too stupid to use it etc. This is one way in which I can tell apart people that like Apple products (ie, me) and fanboys (ie, those who think Apple products are perfection)
      - gte910h 17y ago
        It's not a pure weakness. It's a design choice. I've done embedded devices that run on limited power situations for years. Multi-tasking sucks battery life out because the processor is constantly waking up to do work. If you've used the G1, you will see quickly what multitasking does to batteries. You as a technical person understand this is a tradeoff. Grandma, or Apple Fanboi #5, doesn't understand this, so they destroy their battery life when playing pandora while doing everything else. I wouldn't be upset if it was a setting in the device, such as notifications are currently, but if it's something apps can turn on without choice from the user, true concurrency can tank the battery use time whether people want to use it or not.
        theBobMcCormick 17y ago
        I'm not sure I see how killing your battery listening to Pandora is more confusing than killing your battery listening to MP3's/AAC's?
        WarDekar 17y ago
        It's confusing to a non-techie because they don't realize that the most battery draining activity is using the wireless radio- streaming from Pandora (or anywhere) will kill your battery far faster than listening to MP3s in the iPod software will.
      - wtallis 17y ago
        I don't think I've seen many (if any) direct arguments that multitasking is bad. Most of what I've seen amounts to congratulating Apple for not attempting to provide multitasking when they can't do it without seriously compromising other aspects of the user experience. You don't seem to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs involved. Apple's competitors have chosen to offer multitasking at the expense of performance (responsiveness, battery life, etc.). Apple's strategy so far has been to not take that performance hit. It seems like they may be shifting now to investing far more than their competitors into their software development to ensure that their multitasking won't cause an unacceptable performance hit.
      - 17y ago
    - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
      My money's on some sort of limited form of multitasking, where apps can launch background processes or something like that. In other words, exactly the way Android already does it? :-)
  - bmalicoat 17y ago
    Could be like copy & paste, I didn't know what I was missing really. Didn't think I'd use it and I find myself using it a lot now that it's there.
  - roc 17y ago
    Obvious Prediction: people who can't see the difference between a claimed feature and a feature that is designed and works well will continue to be mystified by people who reject claimed features and acknowledge only features that are designed and work well.
    - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
      Obvious Prediction: Apple fan boys will continue to claim that any feature on an Apple product is well designed and works and will, sight unseen, claim that any feature on a competing product is not well designed and doesn't work. :-) Edit: I should have mentioned the other obvious prediction: Get downvoted to oblivion by Apple fan boys for daring to critique the cult of Apple. :-(
  - wtallis 17y ago
    And as long as the multitasking doesn't introduce undue complexity or any new lag into the UI, there's nothing wrong or hypocritical about that. It's clear from the range of smartphones out there that multitasking is hard to get right. Palm seems to have the best UI for multitasking, but their performance is far below Apple standards. Multitasking is also somewhat of a long-tail feature. The mainstream, non-nerd majority is what Apple's been targeting with the iPhone and the iPad, and to them the lack of multitasking is at worst a nuisance that is usually offset by the platform's other strengths. The nerds who really badly want multitasking are a significant and vocal minority, but still a minority. Apple's established a clear pattern of not releasing a feature until it is done to their satisfaction (see copy and paste), and this feature is easy to get wrong and hard to get right, and it's not a dealbreaker for too much of their market, so it stands to reason that it would be a long time coming. So long as whatever multitasking system Apple releases raises the bar for ease of use, the wait is justified.
  - jsz0 17y ago
    I don't see those as being incompatible positions. Lots of people don't like the BB/WinMo/Android style of multi-tasking. My single biggest frustration with my Android phone is every few days it slows down to a crawl which reminds me to go open Advanced Task Killer and kill off all my background tasks. Some apps run in the background, some quit. Some apps are impossible to quit once started without a third party task manager installed. The GUI for switching apps is a simple alt-tab style switcher. Even something a simple as having thumbnails of the active windows or a taskbar/dock would be a big improvement.
    - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
      Task Killers are a waste of time. http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/ http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...
  - DannoHung 17y ago
    Personally, I just dislike the existing phone UI's for multitasking. If they can make that awesome and battery life doesn't take a nose dive, I'm all for it.
bmalicoat 17y ago
It's a shame they couldn't release the iPads with 4.0 on them because many of the non-technical people won't realize there's an update or no how to update it. Though I guess last time they did an update along with a major device release (iPhone 3G) it was pretty disastrous because of all the hits on their OS and activation servers. Maybe they should have not required iPads to activate via iTunes.
- jonknee 17y ago
  The iPad requires iTunes (you can't even turn it on without iTunes). iTunes lets you know when there's an update and what to do.
  - karipatila 17y ago
    You mean it requires iTunes for the first sync. After that you only need it for backing up.
    - booticon 17y ago
      For what it's worth you also need iTunes for software updates. Maybe one day we'll see OTA updates.
      - protomyth 17y ago
        I would love them to make two changes for 4: OTA updates and syncing to mobileme or a USB hard drive. If they did those two changes, it would open up more people to be able to use and iPad.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      I suppose so if you never want to do any updates or get media onto or off of it. Apple lists iTunes as a requirement so I don't think I'm exaggerating.
- karipatila 17y ago
  This is just the announcement, isn't it? The OS probably comes out with the next phone around June.
kulkarnic 17y ago
Well, not everyone agrees on the definition of multi-tasking. As a consumer, interleaving of processes seems quite adequate to me (i.e. no apps running in the background; apps are suspended on minimize), but an app developer may not agree. I suspect that multitasking support, if introduced will be of the interleaved type- Apple's stance on true background apps being battery killers seems sensible to me. But then, you never know: with the newer iPad style batteries, they might even pull it off! (I still doubt it, though, since that sort of OS update won't work on older iPhones)
- coderdude 17y ago
  What's to agree on? You either have multiple, concurrent tasks or you do not.
  - ugh 17y ago
    I guess the disagreement is about whether multiple, concurrent tasks are necessary or not.
    - coderdude 17y ago
      I think most people are used to their computers being able to play music and browse the Web at the same time. If Apple wants to push the iPad as a computing device, they might hit a snag with consumers. Edit: Whoops. I'll leave the comment but I do realize this isn't an iPad thread.
      - stcredzero 17y ago
        In any case, you can browse and use the iPod app at the same time.
  - kulkarnic 17y ago
    To a consumer, having interleaved tasks might appear like multi-tasking while it technically isn't (which you point out).
  - 17y ago
superjohan 17y ago
As someone who doesn't live in the US, I'm excited way more by this than any iPad news.
- brettnak 17y ago
  As someone who does, I'm still way more excited about this than any iPad news.
  - mcav 17y ago
    This is iPad news.
    - gfodor 17y ago
      Likely big iPad news. I'm hoping for some type of handwriting/fingerpaint recognition, myself.
      - gcheong 17y ago
        Maybe they dusted off the old Newton code?
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      After all, an iPod touch is an iPad nano. ;-)
gojomo 17y ago
I wonder: will iPad owners have to pay for OS updates? For the iPhone, their price has been considered-included, as an accounting matter, in the ongoing revenue Apple shares from the mobile operators. But, for the iPod Touch, upgrade fees have applied to get new features -- with the stated rationale being accounting requirements. The iPad(Wifi only) is clearly more like an iPod Touch. But even the iPad(Wifi+3G), with no long-term contracts and buy-as-you-need-it service, may not have any ongoing Apple revenue share. All iPad owners may be on the hook for a fee when iPhoneOS4.0 arrives.
- rcoder 17y ago
  Given that iPad app pricing has been substantially higher than it is for the iPhone, I can't imagine too many iPad buyers balking at a reasonable OS upgrade fee. Here I define "reasonable" loosely as "cheaper than a desktop OS upgrade", which would put the price cap somewhere in the $20-25 range.
- nixme 17y ago
  The accounting rules were changed after lobbying by Apple and other corps. See http://www.9to5mac.com/FASB-accounting-change-iPhone-AppleTV http://www.9to5mac.com/FASB-accounting-change-iPhone-AppleTV. More info at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/accounting-rules-change-could-end-ipod-touch-update-fee.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/accounting-rules-c... Hopefully this should mean free updates.
- m_eiman 17y ago
  There was an article about that somewhere (can't find it right now) where they say that according to the EULA the 4.x upgrades are included in the iPad price.
- chrisbolt 17y ago
  The iPad software EULA actually mentions this. http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/30/apple-to-charge-for-future-ipad-os-updates/ http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/30/apple-to-charge-for-future-ip... From that, it sounds like they will be charging for updates every two major versions, so not as often as the iPod touch.
tibbon 17y ago
Do we have any actual proof or justification to think that they will add unfettered multitasking or that most consumers are actually demanding such? Seems to be largely speculation.
khelloworld 17y ago
I wonder if Apple could drop the bomb and say they're bringing flash to the platform (since so many people are whining day and night about it) I hope not. On a more positive note, I hope they have multi-tasking and some kind of dashboard feature. As a developer, I really hope they have some kind of CoreImage support.
- rimantas 17y ago
  Bringing flash would be only half of the solution. The usual use cases mentioned are video and games. Well, some video providers already are updating to include non-flash alternatives, but let's say this is valid point. Then we have games, and I am wondering: what's the use of Flash games, which are designed either with keyboard or mouse in mind. How many would be playable with multitouch at all?
- WildUtah 17y ago
  >>bringing flash >>I hope not Me, too. Mobile Webkit is the key to rationalizing the web. All that information-free flash app garbage is finally starting to clear up as clients realize they're missing the most lucrative corner of the market (those who pay more for Apple). The best argument for dynamic HTML sites and HTML 5 is iPhone compatibility. Let's keep Android and iPhone Silverlight- and Flash-free. Okay, mobile vendors?

57 points by anderzole 17y ago

If they announce multitasking for 3rd party apps, it's gonna put a really entertaining new twist on this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171 :-)

martythemaniak 17y ago
Obvious Prediction: All the people that have been vehemently defending Apple's lack of multitasking will very smoothly switch to extolling the virtues of this new feature, and how its way better than Android/BB/whatever.
- mcav 17y ago
  People who defend single-tasking do so because multitasking can cause problems w/r/t memory, performance, and battery life. If Apple releases a solution that doesn't suffer from those issues, there's absolutely nothing wrong with "extolling the virtues" of multitasking. My money's on some sort of limited form of multitasking, where apps can launch background processes or something like that.
  - martythemaniak 17y ago
    I don't think you've been following the conversation very well. When people bring up the iPhone's lack of multitasking (I've done this often in the past), most people will not say something reasonable like "Yes, you're right. It's a weakness of the platform that they should address". No, most of the time its a story about how lack of multitasking is GOOD and how the other platforms are bad for offering it, how users are too stupid to use it etc. This is one way in which I can tell apart people that like Apple products (ie, me) and fanboys (ie, those who think Apple products are perfection)
    - gte910h 17y ago
      It's not a pure weakness. It's a design choice. I've done embedded devices that run on limited power situations for years. Multi-tasking sucks battery life out because the processor is constantly waking up to do work. If you've used the G1, you will see quickly what multitasking does to batteries. You as a technical person understand this is a tradeoff. Grandma, or Apple Fanboi #5, doesn't understand this, so they destroy their battery life when playing pandora while doing everything else. I wouldn't be upset if it was a setting in the device, such as notifications are currently, but if it's something apps can turn on without choice from the user, true concurrency can tank the battery use time whether people want to use it or not.
      - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
        I'm not sure I see how killing your battery listening to Pandora is more confusing than killing your battery listening to MP3's/AAC's?
        WarDekar 17y ago
        It's confusing to a non-techie because they don't realize that the most battery draining activity is using the wireless radio- streaming from Pandora (or anywhere) will kill your battery far faster than listening to MP3s in the iPod software will.
    - wtallis 17y ago
      I don't think I've seen many (if any) direct arguments that multitasking is bad. Most of what I've seen amounts to congratulating Apple for not attempting to provide multitasking when they can't do it without seriously compromising other aspects of the user experience. You don't seem to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs involved. Apple's competitors have chosen to offer multitasking at the expense of performance (responsiveness, battery life, etc.). Apple's strategy so far has been to not take that performance hit. It seems like they may be shifting now to investing far more than their competitors into their software development to ensure that their multitasking won't cause an unacceptable performance hit.
    - 17y ago
  - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
    My money's on some sort of limited form of multitasking, where apps can launch background processes or something like that. In other words, exactly the way Android already does it? :-)
- bmalicoat 17y ago
  Could be like copy & paste, I didn't know what I was missing really. Didn't think I'd use it and I find myself using it a lot now that it's there.
- roc 17y ago
  Obvious Prediction: people who can't see the difference between a claimed feature and a feature that is designed and works well will continue to be mystified by people who reject claimed features and acknowledge only features that are designed and work well.
  - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
    Obvious Prediction: Apple fan boys will continue to claim that any feature on an Apple product is well designed and works and will, sight unseen, claim that any feature on a competing product is not well designed and doesn't work. :-) Edit: I should have mentioned the other obvious prediction: Get downvoted to oblivion by Apple fan boys for daring to critique the cult of Apple. :-(
- wtallis 17y ago
  And as long as the multitasking doesn't introduce undue complexity or any new lag into the UI, there's nothing wrong or hypocritical about that. It's clear from the range of smartphones out there that multitasking is hard to get right. Palm seems to have the best UI for multitasking, but their performance is far below Apple standards. Multitasking is also somewhat of a long-tail feature. The mainstream, non-nerd majority is what Apple's been targeting with the iPhone and the iPad, and to them the lack of multitasking is at worst a nuisance that is usually offset by the platform's other strengths. The nerds who really badly want multitasking are a significant and vocal minority, but still a minority. Apple's established a clear pattern of not releasing a feature until it is done to their satisfaction (see copy and paste), and this feature is easy to get wrong and hard to get right, and it's not a dealbreaker for too much of their market, so it stands to reason that it would be a long time coming. So long as whatever multitasking system Apple releases raises the bar for ease of use, the wait is justified.
- jsz0 17y ago
  I don't see those as being incompatible positions. Lots of people don't like the BB/WinMo/Android style of multi-tasking. My single biggest frustration with my Android phone is every few days it slows down to a crawl which reminds me to go open Advanced Task Killer and kill off all my background tasks. Some apps run in the background, some quit. Some apps are impossible to quit once started without a third party task manager installed. The GUI for switching apps is a simple alt-tab style switcher. Even something a simple as having thumbnails of the active windows or a taskbar/dock would be a big improvement.
  - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
    Task Killers are a waste of time. http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/ http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...
- DannoHung 17y ago
  Personally, I just dislike the existing phone UI's for multitasking. If they can make that awesome and battery life doesn't take a nose dive, I'm all for it.

bmalicoat 17y ago

It's a shame they couldn't release the iPads with 4.0 on them because many of the non-technical people won't realize there's an update or no how to update it. Though I guess last time they did an update along with a major device release (iPhone 3G) it was pretty disastrous because of all the hits on their OS and activation servers. Maybe they should have not required iPads to activate via iTunes.

jonknee 17y ago
The iPad requires iTunes (you can't even turn it on without iTunes). iTunes lets you know when there's an update and what to do.
- karipatila 17y ago
  You mean it requires iTunes for the first sync. After that you only need it for backing up.
  - booticon 17y ago
    For what it's worth you also need iTunes for software updates. Maybe one day we'll see OTA updates.
    - protomyth 17y ago
      I would love them to make two changes for 4: OTA updates and syncing to mobileme or a USB hard drive. If they did those two changes, it would open up more people to be able to use and iPad.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    I suppose so if you never want to do any updates or get media onto or off of it. Apple lists iTunes as a requirement so I don't think I'm exaggerating.
karipatila 17y ago
This is just the announcement, isn't it? The OS probably comes out with the next phone around June.

kulkarnic 17y ago

Well, not everyone agrees on the definition of multi-tasking. As a consumer, interleaving of processes seems quite adequate to me (i.e. no apps running in the background; apps are suspended on minimize), but an app developer may not agree. I suspect that multitasking support, if introduced will be of the interleaved type- Apple's stance on true background apps being battery killers seems sensible to me. But then, you never know: with the newer iPad style batteries, they might even pull it off! (I still doubt it, though, since that sort of OS update won't work on older iPhones)

coderdude 17y ago
What's to agree on? You either have multiple, concurrent tasks or you do not.
- ugh 17y ago
  I guess the disagreement is about whether multiple, concurrent tasks are necessary or not.
  - coderdude 17y ago
    I think most people are used to their computers being able to play music and browse the Web at the same time. If Apple wants to push the iPad as a computing device, they might hit a snag with consumers. Edit: Whoops. I'll leave the comment but I do realize this isn't an iPad thread.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      In any case, you can browse and use the iPod app at the same time.
- kulkarnic 17y ago
  To a consumer, having interleaved tasks might appear like multi-tasking while it technically isn't (which you point out).
- 17y ago

superjohan 17y ago

As someone who doesn't live in the US, I'm excited way more by this than any iPad news.

brettnak 17y ago
As someone who does, I'm still way more excited about this than any iPad news.
- mcav 17y ago
  This is iPad news.
  - gfodor 17y ago
    Likely big iPad news. I'm hoping for some type of handwriting/fingerpaint recognition, myself.
    - gcheong 17y ago
      Maybe they dusted off the old Newton code?
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    After all, an iPod touch is an iPad nano. ;-)

gojomo 17y ago

I wonder: will iPad owners have to pay for OS updates? For the iPhone, their price has been considered-included, as an accounting matter, in the ongoing revenue Apple shares from the mobile operators. But, for the iPod Touch, upgrade fees have applied to get new features -- with the stated rationale being accounting requirements. The iPad(Wifi only) is clearly more like an iPod Touch. But even the iPad(Wifi+3G), with no long-term contracts and buy-as-you-need-it service, may not have any ongoing Apple revenue share. All iPad owners may be on the hook for a fee when iPhoneOS4.0 arrives.

rcoder 17y ago
Given that iPad app pricing has been substantially higher than it is for the iPhone, I can't imagine too many iPad buyers balking at a reasonable OS upgrade fee. Here I define "reasonable" loosely as "cheaper than a desktop OS upgrade", which would put the price cap somewhere in the $20-25 range.
nixme 17y ago
The accounting rules were changed after lobbying by Apple and other corps. See http://www.9to5mac.com/FASB-accounting-change-iPhone-AppleTV http://www.9to5mac.com/FASB-accounting-change-iPhone-AppleTV. More info at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/accounting-rules-change-could-end-ipod-touch-update-fee.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/accounting-rules-c... Hopefully this should mean free updates.
m_eiman 17y ago
There was an article about that somewhere (can't find it right now) where they say that according to the EULA the 4.x upgrades are included in the iPad price.
chrisbolt 17y ago
The iPad software EULA actually mentions this. http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/30/apple-to-charge-for-future-ipad-os-updates/ http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/30/apple-to-charge-for-future-ip... From that, it sounds like they will be charging for updates every two major versions, so not as often as the iPod touch.

tibbon 17y ago

Do we have any actual proof or justification to think that they will add unfettered multitasking or that most consumers are actually demanding such? Seems to be largely speculation.

khelloworld 17y ago

I wonder if Apple could drop the bomb and say they're bringing flash to the platform (since so many people are whining day and night about it) I hope not. On a more positive note, I hope they have multi-tasking and some kind of dashboard feature. As a developer, I really hope they have some kind of CoreImage support.

rimantas 17y ago
Bringing flash would be only half of the solution. The usual use cases mentioned are video and games. Well, some video providers already are updating to include non-flash alternatives, but let's say this is valid point. Then we have games, and I am wondering: what's the use of Flash games, which are designed either with keyboard or mouse in mind. How many would be playable with multitouch at all?
WildUtah 17y ago
>>bringing flash >>I hope not Me, too. Mobile Webkit is the key to rationalizing the web. All that information-free flash app garbage is finally starting to clear up as clients realize they're missing the most lucrative corner of the market (those who pay more for Apple). The best argument for dynamic HTML sites and HTML 5 is iPhone compatibility. Let's keep Android and iPhone Silverlight- and Flash-free. Okay, mobile vendors?