Doing One Thing at a Time

Modern smartphone applications perform a large number of tasks simultaneously—or at least appear to do so. All computers, including smartphones, are so good at switching between different tasks so quickly that it appears they are doing two unrelated things simultaneously.

Many computers have multiple cores, or processing units. These computers really can do more than one thing because each core can work on a separate task. But those cores are also switching very quickly between many tasks that the system and user are trying to do. You might have two, or four, or even more separate cores in your computer or phone, but between the operating system and the apps, the processor has hundreds of small tasks to work on.

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