I think it is high time his Steveness reevaluates iPhone 3rd party apps multi-tasking…

You know I totally understand Apple’s decision to limit the iPhone’s multitasking of 3rd party apps. Battery technology has not kept up to even 1/100th of the Moore’s law rate of technological advancement that chip tech enjoys. Current 3G/4G chipsets, along with the associated Bluetooth stack, are battery drains. And you cannot tack a fat-ass battery to the iPhone and fsck around with the all important Apple product aesthetics.

Product design is all about balancing constraints, to extract maximum benefit for the vast majority of the target audience. So 80% of iPhone users want all-day battery performance. <1% of the iPhone Digerati demand background Pandora audio streaming. Of course Apple is going to design for the masses, damned the rabid geekboys and the “i want to run QIK, Pandora and Apache on my iPhone simultaneously while surf the net and Skyping to my buddies now” crowd. So of course Apple’s is going to cater to the vast majority.

But having played with assorted varieties of the Android phones in the last few weeks, I must admit it is indeed useful to have a limited number of 3rd party apps running in the background, especially music streaming apps like Pandora. I think Apple needs to relook this aspect of the iPhone perhaps for the future generation of iPhone models. Surely Apple has enough engineering talent to improve their battery power management technology (perhaps that’s why they bought PA semi) to allow some form of limited 3rd party apps multitasking. Perhaps hardcode the number of 3rd party apps that can be multitasked (call them apps slots), and initially limit them to perhaps to only 2 apps running simultaneously (one in the foreground and one in the background). Despite the platform limitations of Android (fragmentation, VM limitations, poor hardware abstraction layer drivers, increasing OS version disparity rates ,etc), the Android platform will increasingly become a short to mid term threat because of their superior 3rd party apps management. Apple should not discount the importance of this feature.

My first love, the Atari 800

The Atari 800 celebrated its 30th Anniversary last week, with PC World doing a nice spread here. The Atari 800 was my first computer. I was in my early teens and I pestered my father to buy me a home computer. Not just any computer would do. No, I wanted the most graphically gifted computer at that time, the Atari 800. The Apple II was too utilitarian for me. The others like the TRS-80, Vic-20, Sinclair ZX-81 and the rest were just junk. So after much pestering, my father gave in and bought me one. I was the only kid in the whole neighborhood with a home ‘puter.

Man I loved that computer! I learned BASIC on it, wrote some educational courseware to make some money, played games, logged on to the first BBS on it and even joined an Atari users club. Great times those!

The Atari 800 was the first computer that was designed and sold like a consumer electronics appliance. It was super easy to install and use, had foolproof sealed-box design, and was really built like an appliance. Whereas the Apple II had more of hobbyist computer design ethics.

The Atari 800 used a type of serial daisy chain-able bus called the SIO, something like the present day USB. I’m not sure if this is true, but apparently the gentlemen who was instrumental in designing the Atari SIO later joined Intel was part of the USB design team.The SIO allowed peripherals to be added simply by daisy chaining them, without having to open up the computer.

I still think Steve Jobs got his inspiration for the sealed box design of the first Mac from Atari!