The iPhone 4S -- why it's important

With Steve's passing, it's almost hard to remember that there was another round of Apple news this week, the introduction of the iPhone 4S.

Reactions to it seem to be split between pure disappointment and a nuanced assessment of the iPhone upgrade rhythm (major, minor, major, minor, ...).

But the real news is the upgrade of the processor.  We've seen that there's a been a very gradual and almost grudging introduction of multiprocessing in iOS devices, starting with none in iOS 3 (beyond a phone and iPod apps) and moving to a limited support in iOS 4 with some background processing and push notifications.

But multiprocessing is the key to the next generation of applications.  When you have always connected devices, you are going to want them to always be doing things.  Push notifications are find for infrequent events, but true background processing is what is needed for continual monitoring and processing.

You can say that you can jailbreak the device and get true multiprocessing, but people generally have bad performance experiences -- the hardware hasn't been powerful enough.

It's not clear if the A5 is going to get Apple all the way there, but it is certainly a big step in the process.

If I were an app developer, I would be thinking about what a program that runs persistently in the background could do that is new and compelling.  Then, when iOS 6 is released, I'd be ready to take the market by storm.