3 ms·
Does Apple not allow multiple timers for hardware reasons?
Hi HN, hope you can settle this new years debate for me.
Why do iPhones still only allow one timer? My friend believes it’s due to hardware limitations (only one interrupt based timer, I guess?) but I can’t see that — the watch and TV have the same internals and support multiple, although that means it could be something external.
My theory is the same as why there’s no calculator on the iPad, Apple felt like it
- colinb 4y agoI don’t know why Apple limit the number of timers in this way, but I do know that a single hardwire timer is sufficient to manage thousands of software timers. Look for George Varghese’s work on Timer Wheels if you’re interested. Commonly used in hardware constrained embedded environments.
- battles 4y agoWhy do you think iPhones only allow one timer? I've been using an app that has multiple timers for years on an iPhone 6s. If you're talking about the stock Clock app then you're probably right, they just didn't feel like adding a little more complexity to a stock app.
- MaxLeiter 4y agoMy friend argues those are potentially less accurate than Apples single timer, if Apple is doing some special hardware interfacing versus what a 3rd party app would use with public (polling?) APIs
- 4RealFreedom 4y agoI doubt it about the accuracy but I could be wrong. It's in Apple's best interest to push people to use App Store applications so that might have something to do with it.
- badwolf 4y agoDefinitely a software restriction. Apple Watch supports multiple timers, however you can only have one unnamed timer - for example you could tell your watch "Start a 5 minute timer" then "Start a 10 minute timer for potatoes" to have a second timer called "Potatoes"