Hi HN, hope you can settle this new years debate for me.<p>Why do iPhones still only allow one timer? My friend believes it’s due to hardware limitations (only one interrupt based timer, I guess?) but I can’t see that — the watch and TV have the same internals and support multiple, although that means it could be something external.<p>My theory is the same as why there’s no calculator on the iPad, Apple felt like it
I don’t know why Apple limit the number of timers in this way, but I do know that a single hardwire timer is sufficient to manage thousands of software timers. Look for George Varghese’s work on Timer Wheels if you’re interested. Commonly used in hardware constrained embedded environments.
Definitely a software restriction. Apple Watch supports multiple timers, however you can only have one unnamed timer - for example you could tell your watch "Start a 5 minute timer" then "Start a 10 minute timer for potatoes" to have a second timer called "Potatoes"
Why do you think iPhones only allow one timer? I've been using an app that has multiple timers for years on an iPhone 6s. If you're talking about the stock Clock app then you're probably right, they just didn't feel like adding a little more complexity to a stock app.