Apple's Tablet Apps Will Live and Die by One Nerdy Thing

The following post is a QuickHit™ — an article or post I found online and thought was important enough to share directly with you. Of course, you’ll see my thoughts or opinions prepended or appended to this post, otherwise I’m just scraping content, and that’s not the intent.

Some days I miss my Apple Newton Message Pad. It was bulky and clunky, ran on a whole swack of AA batteries, hummed at a high frequency that only my dogs really appreciated, but it was cool. It was portable, and it worked.

Apparently it also had an operating system that even the current iPhone can’t beat when it comes to Garbage Collection.

For an Apple Tablet to be a hit, it will have to be more than a big-screen iPhone. And the difference between a lithe, touch-based Mac and a giant, lame iPhone comes down to one crucial nerd-factor: memory management.

Memory management is boring to talk about. It’s also boring to do. You’re probably half-asleep just reading this sentence, but that’s sort of the point; developers hate memory management. When they build iPhone apps, they have to control the iPhone’s
memory: what goes in, what gets stored, what comes out. When
your program closes, your app is supposed to give back all that memory
to the OS, so that it your computer can use it for other apps. If your
program doesn’t give back memory to the system, it’s called a “leak.” Leaky programs are bad; they make things crash. But it wasn’t always this way.