There's long been grumbling about the iPhone OS's lack of
multitasking capability, especially its suitability as a serious
business smartphone. However, the clamor has cranked up by several
magnitudes of intensity since the iPad
announcement.
Multitasking on the Mac
My own take is that going back to working without multitasking would
be too much like reverting to the early Mac OS - before MultiFinder was
introduced for System 5.
Say what?
If you've been around the Mac long enough, you'll recall that the
original Mac OS only supported running one application at a time. It's
not a limitation one remembers with fond nostalgia, although in the
days when one ran off a 400K floppy disk that included the OS as well
one or more applications running on machines with only 128 KB or 512 KB
of RAM, there wasn't much practical potential for multitasking.
The closest we came was when Mac OS pioneer Andy Hertzfeld developed
a utility called Switcher in 1985 that facilitated pausing one running
application while you launched another one.
![Macintosh Plus]()
However, with the release of the 1 MB (upgradable to
4 MB) Mac Plus in 1986,
which introduced 800K floppies and the availability of peripheral SCSI
hard drives, much potential was opened up. The MultiFinder extension to
System 5 that came along in August 1987 added the capability to
cooperatively
multitask several applications at once.
I remember what a welcome revelation it was when I first activated
MultiFinder on my Mac Plus under System
6. I had a massive (at least physically) 20 MB SCSI hard drive, and
with 2.5 MB of RAM I could run and switch back and forth between the
two applications I used most in those days - Microsoft Word and
HyperCard - without quitting and restarting the programs each time by
clicking a small button in the menu bar.
With the introduction of System 7 and continuing through Mac OS 9,
enhanced and streamlined MultiFinder cooperative multitasking that no
longer require manually switching between apps was integrated into the
Mac OS. This was eventually superseded by full-fledged preemptive
multitasking in Unix-based Mac OS X.
A lot of us are keeping our fingers crossed that history will repeat
itself with the iPhone (and soon iPad) OS.
Multitasking on the iPhone
To be fair, the iPhone OS is not as totally bereft of multitasking
capability as pre-MultiFinder System 5 and earlier were, since it does
support multiple background processes, but that facility is limited to
the system's built-in features and doesn't support third-party
applications. Ergo, you can listen to music, do email, and download
stuff from iTunes simultaneously, which technically qualifies as
multitasking, but this is not adequate for serious computing.
Arguably, leaving true multitasking out of the iPhone made
considerable sense, since its 76 MB of RAM and tiny display are hardly
conducive to tiling multiple app windows and such. Also, adding true
multitasking would come at a cost of diminished battery life,
performance slowdowns with multiple apps competing for processor power
and memory, need for enhanced app management complexity, and increased
security vulnerabilities.
Why the iPad Needs Multitasking
However, basing the iPad on the iPhone OS alters the equation as
regards multitasking radically. The tablet's substantially larger
display will be large enough to tile or cascade multiple open app
windows and switch back and forth among them as we're accustomed to
doing with desktop and notebook operating system. The inability to do
so represents a serious handicap, especially for serious users who
would relish the iPad's lithe form factor but need to be able to work
with multiple apps at the same time.
Trying to do real work on an iPad without multitasking would be too
much like regressing to pre-MultiFinder days on the Mac.
