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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Multitasking doesn't need to add complexity and stability issues, if ubuntu can do it then so can apple.

It does add more power consumption.

Multitasking is useful because humans are multitasking.

For instance, a navigator that guides someone to their destination could run in parallel to lots of other applications and be very useful that way.

Single tasking computers are pretty much done for, multi tasking is the norm, not the exception. By choosing for a single tasking environment a decision has been made that is going to be relatively hard to undo. All sorts of assumptions have now become embedded in places where they probably shouldn't be, such as dealing with screen input (focus).

I can see why though, it is possibly much harder to get a user interface up and running on a multi-touch display without a mouse if you have multiple applications active.

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>Multitasking doesn't need to add complexity and stability issues, if ubuntu can do it then so can apple.

That it can be done doesn't mean it isn't complex. It is.

And by "stability" I didn't mean the phone/tablet constantly crashing, I meant having inconsistent performance. Once you get into multitasking, everyone and their brother is going to have some really "good" reason they need a service. Some of these will always perform well, some wont.

>Multitasking is useful because humans are multitasking.

Humans are incredibly awful at multitasking.

>Single tasking computers are pretty much done for, multi tasking is the norm, not the exception.

Computers sure. But this is an instant-on consumer device. I think the use cases for such a device are different enough to warrant at least consideration for a different kind of OS for them.

> Humans are incredibly awful at multitasking.

On the contrary, we excel at it by pushing things 'down' when we have mastered them.

For instance, driving and talking to a passenger, walking and thinking about something and so on.

We are so good at it that most of the time we don't even notice any more how many things we are doing at the same time.

The only time we are not multitasking is when we are really concentrating on something difficult, usually problem solving or learning a new skill.

Fair point. But I would point out that the only things this works with are things we have thoroughly mastered (e.g. walking). People have issues talking and driving (e.g. in parts of Europe it's illegal to talk on a cell while driving because of all the accidents it causes).

In my experience it depends on the amount of processing required. If I'm driving a straight away with traffic going mostly the same speed I can hold complex conversations. As soon as something happens on the road I drop the conversation until my attention isn't needed on the road anymore.

Yes, that's exactly how it works. It seems as though the lower level tasks have the ability to push themselves in to the foreground when something happens that they don't know how to handle.

It's an amazing mechanism. Animals can do it too, birds can sing 'on the wing', there are lots of other examples.

Fascinating stuff.

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