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Birchtree
By Matt Birchler
I've been writing here since 2010! Back when personal blogs were all the rage. Kids, ask your parents.

Multitasking vs Parallelism

In my mind, “multitasking” in computers is the ability for the user to actively work on several things at the same time.

Then there’s “parallelism,” which I think of as multitasking+. Yes, it’s partially me working on different things, but also the ability to me to tell my computer to do something, and then I move on to totally different things while it does its thing. For me it’s out of sight, out of mind, but it’s still happening. Examples of this could be rendering a video in Final Cut, downloading a large file in Safari, running a script on a remote server, or moving a file onto an external hard drive. Foreground, background, whatever, the computer knows I want to do it, and will keep going no matter what.

iOS 9 gave us multitasking on the iPad, and I really hope iPadOS 15 makes parallelism more powerful. At the very lest, I’d love it if I could simply start a video export in LumaFusion on my iPad Pro, throw the app in the background, and do other things while it works on it, I’d be very happy.

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