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Im sure it because they want you to upgrade. Multitasking works fine on jailbroken iPhone 3G and 2nd Gen touch.

I had a 3G and while it works for sure, "fine" would be something that is highly debatable.
 
The 3G, iPad and 3GS all have what in common ? Oh right, the amount of RAM they have. :rolleyes:
So much for that argument.
Actually The iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd gen have 128 MB RAM...
The iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen and the iPad have 256 MB. From an application perspective, that's more then 5x the free RAM after the OS is loaded. (The OS and core services take up about 100MB RAM)

We had printing, pre-emptive multi-tasking, GUIs, desktop wallpapers and everything back when PCs had 16 MB of RAM and 100 mhz processors. Scratch that. I got X running on a computer with 8 MB of RAM. And you guys are telling us that performance on a 600 mhz device with 256 MB of Ram would suffer from this ?

Seriously, I doubt Apple is that bad at coding stuff.

Yes, performance DOES suffer when you run out of RAM.
It has nothing to do with bad coding. The issue is optimizing an OS for the environment it will be running in. That RAM critical to improving the experience for the user. You are suggesting that the OS design be targeted at the oldest generation of the platform and ignore the hardware advances over the last two years. I'm sorry, but I don't want to compromise my experience on a new iPhone 4 because you don't want to upgrade.
Apple hasn't removed any features from the older devices. They just made the decision that some of the new features don't run well enough.
 
Pity, but to be expected. Anything over 2 years old tends to be slowly buried by obsolescence.

I've got a 2nd Gen, but I'm not using it as a wider computing platform and never expected to do so. The iPT owners always hope it becomes an iPad, it seems. However, it's a glorified and empowered MP3 player, so don't get too hopeful.
 
Actually it's 128 MB RAM on that generation... And yes performance DOES suffer when you run out of RAM.
It has nothing to do with bad coding. The issue is optimizing an OS for the environment it will be running in. That RAM critical to improving the experience for the user. You are suggesting that the OS design be targeted at the oldest generation of the platform and ignore the hardware advances over the last two years. I'm sorry, but I don't want to compromise my experience on a new iPhone 4 because you don't want to upgrade.
Apple hasn't removed any features from the older devices. They just made the decision that some of the new features don't run well enough.

And again, printing, pre-emptive multi-tasking, GUIs, wallpapers, 16 MB ram.

128 MB ? Ok fine, still doesn't change my argument. My now over a decade old Pentium II had that much RAM. It had a nice desktop wallpaper, printed just fine for all my college assignments, and multi-tasked a web server, data base server, my IM client, desktop environnement, web browser, bunch of terminals and text editors without missing a beat. My even older 486 did the same on much more limited RAM.

And btw, I have an iPhone 3GS, thanks for assuming I had an older device. :rolleyes:
 
Then why are you complaining? nothing was omitted from the 3GS. This thread is about the 3G and the second gen iPod Touch.

I'm not complaining, just pointing out the fact that Apple short changed the iPhone 3G owners, some of whom were sold the device on a contract AFTER iOS 4.0 was released.

Also pointing out the fact that the performance impact argument is bull.
 
And again, printing, pre-emptive multi-tasking, GUIs, wallpapers, 16 MB ram.

16MB? Try 512k on an Amiga 500 from 1985 dude!

Increasingly like Apple sadly, forcing people to upgrade. Quite sucky. I have no doubt all the iOS devices are perfectly capable of AirPrint if Apple wanted them to be.
 
I'm not complaining, just pointing out the fact that Apple short changed the iPhone 3G owners, some of whom were sold the device on a contract AFTER iOS 4.0 was released.

Also pointing out the fact that the performance impact argument is bull.

How were they short changed? They device does everything it was advertised to do.
The RAM argument is the key to the whole thing. The old devices have less then 30 MB free for all third party apps. Adding a background printing service would reduce this further. The device simply would not perform acceptability with the extra overhead.
Sure you could make an optimized OS for the old devices that could provide printing, but that OS would not take advantage of the new device hardware.
 
No worries.

As these become less supported, just rely on the Jailbreak community to open the doors to these features. I have a iPod Touch 2G that supports multitasking, wallpapers, and will eventually likely have Printing too ;) .
 
16MB? Try 512k on an Amiga 500 from 1985 dude!

I wanted to at least keep the wallpapers in the realm of 32 bit color, but yeah, much older computers didn't struggle on this kind of feature list too. ;)

The RAM argument is the key to the whole thing. The old devices have less then 30 MB free for all third party apps. Adding a background printing service would reduce this further. The device simply would not perform acceptability with the extra overhead.

Why did my old PC perform acceptability on 1/8th the RAM doing all the things you say use "extra overhead" ?

And who says it has to be a background service ? Just foreground it for older devices.
 
Sounds actually quite plausible.
No it doesn't .. of course the 2nd gen does background .. ever listened to music while surfing?

For the multitasking I can somewhat understand the decision not to roll it out to older devices. I can't see how printing would put a worrying amount of load on the system that Apple tries to avoid. I mean it is basically "just" the moment of converting whatever you want to print to some sort of postscript .. may take a bit longer but it shouldn't be so dramatic.

T.
 
I don't understand how this is a negative.

It stated on the site it was for multitasking iOS devices which we know the iPT 2nd Gen isn't. At best some lazy copying and pasting went on.
 
As an Iphone 3G owner this is disappointing. Android is looking better and better in terms of long term updating. Tho, its going to be hard to consider as I am an iphone junky, but buying this iPhone in March of 2009 and already having it not supported by certain programs because of hardware limitations makes me think about another purchase of an iphone
 
No it doesn't .. of course the 2nd gen does background .. ever listened to music while surfing?

For the multitasking I can somewhat understand the decision not to roll it out to older devices. I can't see how printing would put a worrying amount of load on the system that Apple tries to avoid. I mean it is basically "just" the moment of converting whatever you want to print to some sort of postscript .. may take a bit longer but it shouldn't be so dramatic.

T.

It's not the CPU load, it's RAM. Have you ever seen the size of print jobs? Once printing is requested, a new RAM intensive process is created to process the job. Without enough RAM, the calling app will be terminated or the the print job will fail.
The devices with 256MB+ will be able to handle the print job w/o terminating the two primary tasks (app and print queue).
The iPod Touch 2nd Gen has more free RAM then the iPhone 3G since the phone services are not running. Apple appears to have initially thought that this was enough memory to get the job done, but backpedaled as the code became for feature complete.
The fact that Apple tried to get the older iPod Touch to run printing, tells me that this was a technical issue, but a push to make users upgrade.
 
Why did my old PC perform acceptability on 1/8th the RAM doing all the things you say use "extra overhead" ?

I'm assuming that you don't use Windows 3.1 anymore. Why did you upgrade? You upgraded because and OS is more then a bullet list of features. The refinement that people are looking for comes at the expense of system resources. As Apple or Google continue upgrading there OS's, more RAM will be required. Some features will not be possible on the old hardware without compromising the forward growth of the new devices.
 
err404, I can appreciate your reasoning, but decades of computer science prove you wrong. Printing has been done in much less RAM before. Unless you're accusing Apple of being sloppy coders...

I'm assuming that you don't use Windows 3.1 anymore.

Bzzzt... Windows 3.1 did cooperative multi-tasking. Since I have been talking about pre-emptive multi-tasking all this time, I don't see why you're bringing up Windows 3.1 into the discussion.
 
As an Iphone 3G owner this is disappointing. Android is looking better and better in terms of long term updating. Tho, its going to be hard to consider as I am an iphone junky, but buying this iPhone in March of 2009 and already having it not supported by certain programs because of hardware limitations makes me think about another purchase of an iphone

You know that an Android G1 device from the iPhone 3G era can't be upgrade past 1.6. I fail to see how this is a superior experience.

err404, I can appreciate your reasoning, but decades of computer science prove you wrong. Printing has been done in much less RAM before. Unless you're accusing Apple of being sloppy coders...
We aren't printing docs from decades ago. Go print a complex word doc and tell me how large the print spool is. I commonly see docs over 100MB. Even the idle print spooler on my windows machine is consuming 13MB right now.
Bzzzt... Windows 3.1 did cooperative multi-tasking. Since I have been talking about pre-emptive multi-tasking all this time, I don't see why you're bringing up Windows 3.1 into the discussion.

We're not talking about multitasking at all. This thread is about printing. The point is OS's grow as user expectations grow.
 
And again, printing, pre-emptive multi-tasking, GUIs, wallpapers, 16 MB ram.

128 MB ? Ok fine, still doesn't change my argument. My now over a decade old Pentium II had that much RAM. It had a nice desktop wallpaper, printed just fine for all my college assignments, and multi-tasked a web server, data base server, my IM client, desktop environnement, web browser, bunch of terminals and text editors without missing a beat. My even older 486 did the same on much more limited RAM.

And btw, I have an iPhone 3GS, thanks for assuming I had an older device. :rolleyes:

Your Pentium II system likely also had pagefiles. The IOS devices do not.

Regardless, my iPod Touch 2G runs fine with the "unsupported' features jailbroken and enabled (even true multitasking enabled with Backgrounder), though it can be slow, and sometimes active applications will crash freeing up Memory.

I think Apple is just doing the tried and true "sales driven forced obsolescence".
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; Dell Streak Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17)

@ err404

The G1 has a stable Android 2.2 build courtesy of Cyanogenmod 6.
Does that not count?

EDIT: I know that CM6 isn\'t an official build but one of the big differences between iOS and Android is that the open source community (xda-devs for example) can get together to keep things rolling.
 
Your Pentium II system likely also had pagefiles. The IOS devices do not.

Apple could readily use the Flash portion of the phone as a temporary buffer space to spool a print job. Their OS, they are not limited by the APIs in the SDK. They can pull a Cartman and do "whatever they want".

But seriously, we had printing on devices that had less than 128 MB of RAM+swap back in the days, yet still managed to multi-task and have full graphical interfaces...

We aren't printing docs from decades ago. Go print a complex word doc and tell me how large the print spool is. I commonly see docs over 100MB. Even the idle print spooler on my windows machine is consuming 13MB right now.

And you don't think print spoolers have changed all that much in 10 years I hope ? Now I know you're calling Apple inefficient, since you just compared them to Microsoft.

We're not talking about multitasking at all. This thread is about printing. The point is OS's grow as user expectations grow.

We're not talking about a 3 year old device here, we're talking about a device sold in retail channels a month ago in the case of the iPod Touch.

@ err404

The G1 has a stable Android 2.2 build courtesy of Cyanogenmod 6.
Does that not count?

No, of course it doesn't. That proves the point that hardware is being obsoleted not because it's actually obsolete but because manufacturers want to get your upgrade dollars!
 
Your Pentium II system likely also had pagefiles. The IOS devices do not.

Regardless, my iPod Touch 2G runs fine with the "unsupported' features jailbroken and enabled (even true multitasking enabled with Backgrounder), though it can be slow, and sometimes active applications will crash freeing up Memory.

I think Apple is just doing the tried and true "sales driven forced obsolescence".

On one hand say that your apps crash with these enabled and on the other you call Apple greedy for not including them. Maybe they consider the impact of enabling them unacceptable.

The G1 has a stable Android 2.2 build courtesy of Cyanogenmod 6.
Does that not count?

No, that does not count since the 3G will add these things to via JB. the user just has to accept with the sub-optimal experience.
Also as I understand it, 2.2 on the G1 runs slow and is lacking many features (Flash being a big one)
 
On one hand say that your apps crash with these enabled and on the other you call Apple greedy for not including them. Maybe they consider the impact of enabling them unacceptable.

The beauty of choice is being able to choose for yourself which you'd rather have. Performance or utility. The beauty of options is that they can be turned on/off.

That is good design, offering choice to your user so that he can get performance when he needs it and utility when he does. Throwing hardware at a problem is only resulting in software bloat.
 
You know that an Android G1 device from the iPhone 3G era can't be upgrade past 1.6. I fail to see how this is a superior experience.


The phones that were released in the last year in a half will have about 3-4 lifespan with updates going threw the 3rd year according to the developers. I dont see Android as a "superior" experience but as an alternative for those who cant afford to have a cell phone only last about 2 years before they cannot take advantage of some of the great qualities that are currently offered. As in the last year Apple has stepped it's game up but the 3G owners cannot take advantage of it.
 
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