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Comment by lsb | Hacker News Reader

How would you do multi-tasking, while promising ten hours of battery life?

Perhaps he values multi-tasking more than having ten hours of battery life.

I think the point is that the consumers Apple targets would value 10 hours battery life over multitasking. Engineering is all about trade offs, and if Apple were to deliver everything the geeks wanted (OSX, Flash, multitasking), then Apple would end up with an overpriced, slow, thick, hot, sluggish, power thirsty tablet that would only appeal to computer nerds.

I just don't understand this dichotomy between battery life and multitasking. It would be perfectly reasonable to offer a choice, wouldn't it? Apple could say: if you want the full 10 hours of battery life, don't multitask. Otherwise, accept the battery life tradeoff and multitask to your heart's content. I can then choose to use the device however I want to. Isn't this how battery life estimates with laptops work?

Why does Apple assume their users are idiots that can't be trusted to make an informed choice?

Apple's strategy is to not burden their users with the mental load of having to make that tradeoff. Can you imagine trying to use this device for a whole workday and having to worry about whether you quit that last app so that the battery will last until your shift's up?

For casual multi-tasking, the speed of the flash memory means that well-written apps should be able to save and restore their state pretty quickly even if the operating system does quit the app when the user switches to a new one. More serious multi-tasking (where you would want side-by-side windows and other major UI changes) would definitely reduce battery life and make things much more complex.

* Apple's strategy is to not burden their users with the mental load of having to make that tradeoff. *

Haven't users been making that tradeoff for years with laptops?

Battery life has nothing to do with multi-tasking. It's about providing consistent UX and not having to deal with misbehaving background processes.

They most certainly could be related. If you had a few background apps doing something, such as playing music while browsing the web, that would take more clock cycles. Even something like a native twitter app running in the background could be pinging twitter several times a minute, obviously requiring power to do so.

Every iPhone and iPod Touch ever released has had background apps running at all times to provide services like e-mail. How do you think the iPod mode on an iPhone works? It plays music while you're browsing in Safari by leaving an app running in the background. Email notifications? App running in the background.

Apple controlled, well optimized items running in the background.

Not multiple applications in the AppStore sense of the word.

I would rather have be usable for 4 hours than limited for 10. If you can run iPhone apps not in full screen, why can't I run a few side by side. I don't want unlimited multitasking, but a few at a time would be nice.

That is exactly what I thought. I would have loved to see iphone apps running like widgets. Keep them the same size, but give me three or four running at the same time!

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