They've moved through many CPUs and many OSes. They seem to know how to do the architecture so that they can swap out the hardware and so forth without the users noticing except for the faster speed.

Yeah, if it's cooperative multitasking initially, that's not ideal. But it'll probably work better on a locked-down platform like the iPad than it did in Win2.x Presumably, if someone writes an app that hogs the system, Apple won't let it through. Supposedly, future versions of the iPod and iPad will have the ARM Cortex 9 dual-core chips, so they'll have the hardware for more advanced schedulers, etc.

Apparently, it's not so much "cooperative multitasking" as limited exposure of system multitasking services - http://www.tech-news...multitasking.html

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.