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> Tradeoffs. Mutually exclusive tradeoffs. Separate devices are required. ... And you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously in the background
by zmmmmm 15y ago
> Tradeoffs. Mutually exclusive tradeoffs. Separate devices are required. ... And you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously in the background without sacrificing battery life and foreground app performance
This is a typical Gruberism of false logic. He starts with the notion that all Apple's decisions are holy and right. He then derives conclusions by extrapolating from that.
There is no reason that tablets cannot achieve fantastic battery life while running background processes. They certainly need to be designed to achieve it. Existing Android tablets support background processes and multitasking and get comparable battery life to the iPad - typically we're talking a sacrifice of < 10% battery life to achieve an incredible expansion of utility. And this is not taking into account the fact that Android is a less efficient OS overall (utilizing less hardware acceleration, running most tasks inside a Dalvik VM instead of native, etc.) Even the iPad itself evidently does background processing as you can have it play music, give you calendar reminders and all kinds of other things happen in the background even when it is in sleep state.
- ugh 15y agoCompared to desktop operating systems Android does very limited multitasking or, to put it in another way, it is cleverer about multitasking (iOS, too). Remaining backwards compatible while picking up such a new model of multitasking is hard. Very hard. Apple made parts of it opt-in with Lion but that’s not the same as requiring everyone to adhere to the model and today hardly any app supports it. Gruber simply sees this as a hard challenge that is, at least currently, not solvable if Windows is to stay backwards compatible. That’s all. He might be wrong but I think that position is quite sensible.