This bold critique takes aim at one of iOS 4's most hyped features - multitasking - arguing that Apple's addation was misleading and problematic. Patrick Bisch delivers a technically informed takedown of what many users celebrated as a major advancement, using the actual definition of computer multitasking to highlight the gap between Apple's marketing and reality.
The author's main grievance centers on the fact that iOS 4's "multitasking" didn't actually allow true simultaneous performance of tasks. Using a relatable YouTube example, he shows how users might expect to let a video buffer while writing an email, only to return and find the video hadn't progressed at all. This revealed that while apps remained "open" in memory, they weren't actually executing tasks in the background - a important limitation that contradicted user expectations based on Apple's marketing.
Beyond features issues, Bisch identifies serious performance problems with the multitasking system. He points out that every opened app consumed RAM, leading to system slowdowns after running 10-15 applications, sometimes dropping available memory to just 4MB. The manual process of closing apps through the double-click interface was cumbersome, and Apple's refusal to include a toggle to disable multitasking entirely frustrated users who preferred the previous single-app model.
This critique proves remarkably prescient when viewed 15 years later. The author correctly identified fundamental issues with early iOS multitasking that Apple would spend years refining. Modern iOS has evolved to include more intelligent background app management, automatic app suspension, and better memory improvement - essentially addressing every concern raised in this post. The piece captures an important moment when iOS was transitioning from a single-app mobile operating system to something more complex, and the growing pains that came with that evolution. It also shows how early smartphone users were still learning what to expect from mobile multitasking compared to desktop computing.
This summary was created by Dave Rogers. The original post was written by Patrick Bisch and published on September 1, 2010.
If you'd like to view the original post, you can find it here.