It "freezes" an app the instant you are no longer looking at it on your screen. For the purposes of a phone, or even split-screen operation of an iPad, this is extremely effective. You are only ever looking at one app - two at most - with perhaps some framework-delivered supporting information on the periphery. Just because you can't imagine solutions to CPU/memory management for the general case, does not mean there aren't (often obvious) improvements that can be implemented for various specific cases. A small screen where a user tends to do one thing at a time is a perfect example.
So change the per-app setting and disallow the app from doing anything at all in the background. Problem solved, without a bunch of OCD force-quit finger-flicking every couple of hours.
iOS has not had to "fake" multi-tasking for quite a few versions now. Why base your imaginings on that?
iOS now selectively freezes applications on a per-thread basis, depending on the services identified as being handled by each thread, and orders the app to save state preparatory to being potentially killed shortly after is has been backgrounded in the UI. This effectively makes most apps flash-frozen in RAM, and all apps instantly killable on-demand if memory pressure demands it.
Going into the app switcher and "killing" them just wastes your time, and your device's battery, sending deallocation commands to things that are only there because the RAM hasn't been requested for anything else yet, or even worse, just loading the saved thumbnail images of the last seen state of an app that has ALREADY been deallocated (eating up some of your RAM as it does so) so you can flick your thumb upward on them and remove them from the list. There is honestly no point to this exercise except to indulge your OCD.
The real savings is in the designated threads for designated services: They are policed. A thread that is allowed to continue running in order to keep playing you music, for example, is actually disallowed from claiming more than a certain percentage of CPU time, and disallowed from accessing certain frameworks.
That said, some applications try to abuse this. A few versions and iOS updates back, there was a furor over the way Facebook behaved when it was backgrounded. It actually spun up a fake "music" thread, playing dead silence, and used it to fetch more network data than it was otherwise allowed, which in turn drained battery faster.
If you suspect there are apps doing nefarious crap like this, go to settings > general > usage > battery and look at the statistics. The culprit in your declining battery will be shown right there. If you want you can hit a few switches and deny that app all background activity.
"Dozens of calculations per second" hasn't been considered computationally expensive for about _40_years_.
The iPhone 7 contains a motion coprocessor chip that performs these calculations and tens of thousands more every second, using a vanishingly small amount of power. Positional data from wifi networks, cell towers, GPS, GLONASS, the compass, and the inertial sensors inside the phone is combined when and where available automatically. What isn't needed is powered down.
Even if getting accurate GPS data is harder in cities, it is irrelevant, given that cities contain way more cell towers and way more wifi networks, and the iPhone knows its position from those automatically in the course of normal operation without even needing to query GPS.... which it does anyway because the power involved is, again, miniscule. Seriously: If the phone can detect three cell towers - practically a given in any good-sized city - it knows where it is just by being a phone. Ten years ago cell towers didn't provide the necessary positional and timing information for this to be so. Now they almost always do.
Let's all have some more humility here. Knowing something about GPS does not make us experts in the design of the most bleeding-edge mass communications tool on the planet, and/or the networks that drive it.
The new phone came with a 2-inch adapter, and I plugged it into the end of my headphone cord, and since then the loss of a headphone jack hasn't affected me at all.
Except for that one time when I wanted to use headphones and charge at the same time, and that's when I discovered that I can get a little bluetooth widget that supports AptX, with a microphone built in, and now I plug the same ol' pair of headphone into that, and I don't even need to be carrying the phone any more when I'm home. I just plant it on the stand, and the bluetooth range of about 25 feet in all directions is good enough to cover the whole house. It cost less than 20 bucks.
In the end, it wasn't like Apple removed the headphone jack, it was like Apple removed the whole damn phone. Now it's just my headphones and a 3-ounce widget I carry around. The music sounds just as good and the calls are just as clear.
Any minute now! It's the world's most valuable company; what more proof do you need that it has nowhere to go but down? Washed up! Has-been! Can't-hack-it! (...At being the world's most valuable company -- some loss.)
I'm sorry; you're just taking this news too reasonably. Get with the program here: Apple is sending hired goons to our houses to literally grab our old phones out of our hands and grind them into a fine spicy powder, forcing us to go out and buy them again. Their 100% recyclable materials and 100% renewable energy stance is mere posturing and they are no better than Halliburton, Shell Oil, and Blackwater. Boo, hiss, et cetera.
So let me get this straight... we have tens of thousands of these devices going into the trash and it's the industry's fault, for making a shinier new phone available each year, instead of a "more responsible" five year or ten year delay?
Not a word for the besotted user who donates their old phone to a relative, or a friend, or sells it, or just plain gives it away, in order to get the shinier one with the force-touch or the better battery or the slightly different size?
Smartphones are hot stuff right now. The pace of innovation in them is astonishing. The ones that sell today, the new flagship ones, they're shot through-and-through with technology that wasn't around even five years ago. A different process for chipmaking. Different battery chemistry and manufacturing. Smaller sensors. Finer, lower-power displays with better color. Fingerprint scanners. Hardware-level encryption. New antenna designs. Blah blah blah. You would prefer that this progress be artificially slowed, to make them less compelling to customers?
You know what really, really bugs me? That I can't replace my steering wheel with a set of forked handles like I used playing Road Blasters in the arcade when I was 10. I paid for the dang thing; I want CONTROL over it!
Joking aside, you can shut off that plugin beep by just switching your phone to silent mode. Also, you can use an app like PhoneView to copy all kinds of things on and off you phone, including message history and call logs, without jailbreaking.
Complete disagreement. LEO is a fine stopping point for humans just now. Robots, on the other hand...
We are right now making astounding advancements in software and sensors.
We will soon be able to deliver robots to Mars and beyond that can go so many places, and gather so much data, that millions of people on Earth will be able to stroll around the solar system in VR headsets, rather than a dozen or so armor-wrapped and cancer-riddled astronauts. (Not by directly controlling robots of course, but by constructing virtual environments based on their data.)
Let robots pave the way for 20 years. Digging caves, gathering fuel, laying lines, testing shuttlecraft, installing shielding, distilling water, engineering soil, growing crops,... Mark my words; in ten years we will be launching robots smart enough to answer their own questions at press conferences.
There is a lot to like in this comment, but what stands out to me, is the point made that without Apple strong-arming carriers in negotiations for the very first iPhone a decade go, all the other smartphone offerings from every other vendor would still happily be:
* Chucking bloatware onto their phones. * Tracking and data-mining the living hell out of everything you do on the device, ignoring all issues of consent. * Nickle-and-diming SMS-message users with absurd costs for what is actually the most lightweight communication method on their networks. * Fostering a thriving software piracy industry, with lowest-common-denominator copy protection across a dozen shady "app stores", therefore NO renaissance in software development like we've seen these last ten years. *... And of course, your phone would be perpetually crashing, dying, or getting backdoored, since half the web would be in Flash objects.
The strong-arm negotiations they made, with that first product launch, should qualify as a stand-alone _legend_ in the history of the tech industry.
Got numbers and a reference? Otherwise I'm just gonna say that that gift card revenue is not recorded that way, because it does not make accounting sense to do so. That week could just as easily be defined by massive returns of unwanted gifts;)
No, Mr. Anonymous, Apple is not. Apple has never, EVER, >> EVER chased sales volume as a metric of success. That's practically a part of their company charter. There have been whole chapters of books written about this fact, and why it has made them such an envied company with such envied margins.
And yet, they've ended up making such darned good products, and aggressively driving down costs, that they manage a pretty amazing sales volume anyway.
But wait about five years, when Apple has crammed ten times the power of the current iPhone into a watch body, and linked it to a pair of slim, light VR sunglasses that you control by wiggling your fingers and/or gesturing in the air.
People will be dumping their iPhones into the sea, and the "apple VR watch" will become the one product everyone on Earth needs.
If your Apple Watch battery goes dead and you don't replace it out of frustration, Apple still has the money you spent on that first watch, even if it didn't last 20 years like the Rolex might. Apple doesn't have a "problem" there. What they have, is a second chance to sell you a watch.
Slashdot Mirror
It "freezes" an app the instant you are no longer looking at it on your screen.
For the purposes of a phone, or even split-screen operation of an iPad, this is extremely effective. You are only ever looking at one app - two at most - with perhaps some framework-delivered supporting information on the periphery.
Just because you can't imagine solutions to CPU/memory management for the general case, does not mean there aren't (often obvious) improvements that can be implemented for various specific cases. A small screen where a user tends to do one thing at a time is a perfect example.
So change the per-app setting and disallow the app from doing anything at all in the background.
Problem solved, without a bunch of OCD force-quit finger-flicking every couple of hours.
You would be imagining incorrectly then.
iOS has not had to "fake" multi-tasking for quite a few versions now. Why base your imaginings on that?
iOS now selectively freezes applications on a per-thread basis, depending on the services identified as being handled by each thread, and orders the app to save state preparatory to being potentially killed shortly after is has been backgrounded in the UI. This effectively makes most apps flash-frozen in RAM, and all apps instantly killable on-demand if memory pressure demands it.
Going into the app switcher and "killing" them just wastes your time, and your device's battery, sending deallocation commands to things that are only there because the RAM hasn't been requested for anything else yet, or even worse, just loading the saved thumbnail images of the last seen state of an app that has ALREADY been deallocated (eating up some of your RAM as it does so) so you can flick your thumb upward on them and remove them from the list. There is honestly no point to this exercise except to indulge your OCD.
The real savings is in the designated threads for designated services: They are policed. A thread that is allowed to continue running in order to keep playing you music, for example, is actually disallowed from claiming more than a certain percentage of CPU time, and disallowed from accessing certain frameworks.
That said, some applications try to abuse this. A few versions and iOS updates back, there was a furor over the way Facebook behaved when it was backgrounded. It actually spun up a fake "music" thread, playing dead silence, and used it to fetch more network data than it was otherwise allowed, which in turn drained battery faster.
If you suspect there are apps doing nefarious crap like this, go to settings > general > usage > battery and look at the statistics. The culprit in your declining battery will be shown right there. If you want you can hit a few switches and deny that app all background activity.
Wow. You have to switch it on and off manually to keep it from cratering your battery? What is this, 2008?
"Dozens of calculations per second" hasn't been considered computationally expensive for about _40_years_.
The iPhone 7 contains a motion coprocessor chip that performs these calculations and tens of thousands more every second, using a vanishingly small amount of power. Positional data from wifi networks, cell towers, GPS, GLONASS, the compass, and the inertial sensors inside the phone is combined when and where available automatically. What isn't needed is powered down.
Even if getting accurate GPS data is harder in cities, it is irrelevant, given that cities contain way more cell towers and way more wifi networks, and the iPhone knows its position from those automatically in the course of normal operation without even needing to query GPS. ... which it does anyway because the power involved is, again, miniscule. Seriously: If the phone can detect three cell towers - practically a given in any good-sized city - it knows where it is just by being a phone. Ten years ago cell towers didn't provide the necessary positional and timing information for this to be so. Now they almost always do.
Let's all have some more humility here. Knowing something about GPS does not make us experts in the design of the most bleeding-edge mass communications tool on the planet, and/or the networks that drive it.
How about a pair of AR glasses that can substitute for the iPhone display, so you can use it without even looking at it?
The new phone came with a 2-inch adapter, and I plugged it into the end of my headphone cord, and since then the loss of a headphone jack hasn't affected me at all.
Except for that one time when I wanted to use headphones and charge at the same time, and that's when I discovered that I can get a little bluetooth widget that supports AptX, with a microphone built in, and now I plug the same ol' pair of headphone into that, and I don't even need to be carrying the phone any more when I'm home. I just plant it on the stand, and the bluetooth range of about 25 feet in all directions is good enough to cover the whole house. It cost less than 20 bucks.
In the end, it wasn't like Apple removed the headphone jack, it was like Apple removed the whole damn phone. Now it's just my headphones and a 3-ounce widget I carry around. The music sounds just as good and the calls are just as clear.
Any minute now!
It's the world's most valuable company; what more proof do you need that it has nowhere to go but down?
Washed up! Has-been! Can't-hack-it! (...At being the world's most valuable company -- some loss.)
... and this cranky, inflammatory, self-centered rant is not anything That Matters.
Slashdot: The new Yahoo home page.
I have an Apple II+ that works perfectly to this day.
Wanna fight?
I'm sorry; you're just taking this news too reasonably. Get with the program here: Apple is sending hired goons to our houses to literally grab our old phones out of our hands and grind them into a fine spicy powder, forcing us to go out and buy them again. Their 100% recyclable materials and 100% renewable energy stance is mere posturing and they are no better than Halliburton, Shell Oil, and Blackwater. Boo, hiss, et cetera.
So let me get this straight ... we have tens of thousands of these devices going into the trash and it's the industry's fault, for making a shinier new phone available each year, instead of a "more responsible" five year or ten year delay?
Not a word for the besotted user who donates their old phone to a relative, or a friend, or sells it, or just plain gives it away, in order to get the shinier one with the force-touch or the better battery or the slightly different size?
Smartphones are hot stuff right now. The pace of innovation in them is astonishing. The ones that sell today, the new flagship ones, they're shot through-and-through with technology that wasn't around even five years ago. A different process for chipmaking. Different battery chemistry and manufacturing. Smaller sensors. Finer, lower-power displays with better color. Fingerprint scanners. Hardware-level encryption. New antenna designs. Blah blah blah. You would prefer that this progress be artificially slowed, to make them less compelling to customers?
Do you work for Microsoft? :D
>90% of iOS users do.
>90% of Android users don't.
You know what really, really bugs me? That I can't replace my steering wheel with a set of forked handles like I used playing Road Blasters in the arcade when I was 10. I paid for the dang thing; I want CONTROL over it!
Joking aside, you can shut off that plugin beep by just switching your phone to silent mode. Also, you can use an app like PhoneView to copy all kinds of things on and off you phone, including message history and call logs, without jailbreaking.
Continue laughing all the way to the bank?
Complete disagreement. LEO is a fine stopping point for humans just now. Robots, on the other hand ...
We are right now making astounding advancements in software and sensors.
We will soon be able to deliver robots to Mars and beyond that can go so many places, and gather so much data, that millions of people on Earth will be able to stroll around the solar system in VR headsets, rather than a dozen or so armor-wrapped and cancer-riddled astronauts. (Not by directly controlling robots of course, but by constructing virtual environments based on their data.)
Let robots pave the way for 20 years. Digging caves, gathering fuel, laying lines, testing shuttlecraft, installing shielding, distilling water, engineering soil, growing crops, ... Mark my words; in ten years we will be launching robots smart enough to answer their own questions at press conferences.
That's a beautiful dream.
"... launch into orbit from Mars' surface and return in one piece several thousand times ..."
That's a beautiful fantasy.
There is a lot to like in this comment, but what stands out to me, is the point made that without Apple strong-arming carriers in negotiations for the very first iPhone a decade go, all the other smartphone offerings from every other vendor would still happily be:
* Chucking bloatware onto their phones. ... And of course, your phone would be perpetually crashing, dying, or getting backdoored, since half the web would be in Flash objects.
* Tracking and data-mining the living hell out of everything you do on the device, ignoring all issues of consent.
* Nickle-and-diming SMS-message users with absurd costs for what is actually the most lightweight communication method on their networks.
* Fostering a thriving software piracy industry, with lowest-common-denominator copy protection across a dozen shady "app stores", therefore NO renaissance in software development like we've seen these last ten years.
*
The strong-arm negotiations they made, with that first product launch, should qualify as a stand-alone _legend_ in the history of the tech industry.
Got numbers and a reference? Otherwise I'm just gonna say that that gift card revenue is not recorded that way, because it does not make accounting sense to do so. That week could just as easily be defined by massive returns of unwanted gifts ;)
No, Mr. Anonymous, Apple is not. Apple has never, EVER, >> EVER chased sales volume as a metric of success. That's practically a part of their company charter. There have been whole chapters of books written about this fact, and why it has made them such an envied company with such envied margins.
And yet, they've ended up making such darned good products, and aggressively driving down costs, that they manage a pretty amazing sales volume anyway.
You mean, because Tom Cruise is still making movies??
If their next "walled garden" has windows and skylights as big as the current one, I won't mind.
You say that now.
But wait about five years, when Apple has crammed ten times the power of the current iPhone into a watch body, and linked it to a pair of slim, light VR sunglasses that you control by wiggling your fingers and/or gesturing in the air.
People will be dumping their iPhones into the sea, and the "apple VR watch" will become the one product everyone on Earth needs.
I misread that as
"sometimes the faceless internet asks us questions and we answer back with dicks." ... and was nodding sagely even as I realized my mistake.
That's not a bad thing.
If your Apple Watch battery goes dead and you don't replace it out of frustration, Apple still has the money you spent on that first watch, even if it didn't last 20 years like the Rolex might. Apple doesn't have a "problem" there. What they have, is a second chance to sell you a watch.