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Apple Debuts App Windows, Full External Display Support, and More for M1 iPads
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Like, what type of workflows are you doing that the iPad isn’t suitable for? I’ve never really gotten a clear answer from anyone when I’ve asked that, the impression I’ve gotten is that it’s mostly “I’m used to working with a bunch of windows [very few of which are ever in active play at the same time], and I’m not interested in changing how I work”. It’s my experience that windows just multiply and add clutter and friction, it’s not an especially great way of working. Windows from 8 apps at a time is really quite a bit, I’d imagine most people don’t have workflows that need more than that (that can’t be separated into another window group). That’s legitimately a lot of windows to be juggling for any one task, surely such a workflow can be broken into smaller functional limits?
I saw that during the keynote and thought, “that’s huge, but it’s also the sort of thing that’s gonna fly over the heads of most of the people on MacRumors”.
I love all these people coming in here and acting like you shouldn't ever expect software updates for your device, as if we should be grateful for getting a single year's worth of iPadOS updates.
We're in the middle of economic uncertainty amidst record inflation and we're supposed to just spend nearly a thousand dollars to get these features when we already spent that same damn amount of money on a "pro" device just a few years ago? Every single iPad Pro has been massively overspecced, with reviewers saying they're excited to see what's to come with iPadOS. I guess what they should have said was don't buy these devices unless what you're looking for is a thousand-dollar big iPhone. After all, we're not supposed to buy products expecting any kind of future updates!
I know when Apple holds features back due to performance. It sucks, but it's a valid reason. Nobody is going to convince me that the A12X processor and 4 gigs of RAM in my iPad Pro can't handle floating windows, some form of true external display support (even if the number of running apps is cut down), and most of the other features introduced in this update.
Oh well, it is what it is. I'm off to go worship Tim Cook for having the love and altruism to allow my 2020 MacBook Pro yet another update that I am wholly undeserving of.
We're in the middle of economic uncertainty amidst record inflation and we're supposed to just spend nearly a thousand dollars to get these features when we already spent that same damn amount of money on a "pro" device just a few years ago? Every single iPad Pro has been massively overspecced, with reviewers saying they're excited to see what's to come with iPadOS. I guess what they should have said was don't buy these devices unless what you're looking for is a thousand-dollar big iPhone. After all, we're not supposed to buy products expecting any kind of future updates!
I know when Apple holds features back due to performance. It sucks, but it's a valid reason. Nobody is going to convince me that the A12X processor and 4 gigs of RAM in my iPad Pro can't handle floating windows, some form of true external display support (even if the number of running apps is cut down), and most of the other features introduced in this update.
Oh well, it is what it is. I'm off to go worship Tim Cook for having the love and altruism to allow my 2020 MacBook Pro yet another update that I am wholly undeserving of.
Of course. I don’t buy something for features it doesn’t have. And I don’t expect 4 year old hardware to run the newest features that require newer hardware.
You don't need a display for Stage.
Not revamped, but Files has increased functionality.
Am I the only one who was reminded of this?
Yeah, most any old ipad can output a 16:9 screen, but not have the RAM and SSD performance to make the whole thing work well. It's too bad though there couldn't have been an in-between mode like when they introduced the split screen/slideover multitasking where older low RAM ipads only got slideover or whatever it was.
My 4th gen Air has hardware more than capable of this too :/
Finally some good ****ing windows support
Thank goodness I sold my 2018 pro at the right time though lol
Thank goodness I sold my 2018 pro at the right time though lol
Likewise, I’d imagine that Stage Manager on the iPad takes advantage of swap memory. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Stage Manager Needs an M1 for that reason alone.
Reason? I’d imagine that swap storage depends on the storage controller to some extent (and maybe even the memory manager). Spinning hard disks generally have a virtually infinite number of read-write cycles, but their mechanical bits fail over time. Solid state storage, on the other hand, has no mechanical bits to fail, but they have issues with wear leveling. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if hardware needs controller support for using solid state primary storage as virtual memory (and the memory manager might need to support it, too), and it wouldn’t be at all weird for processors originally designed for phones not to have the necessary support. But the M1, being a chip designed for a desktop PC, likely has the memory manager and storage controller hardware necessary to support virtual memory without causing undue wear and tear on the primary storage. We tend to take virtual memory for granted on desktops (but I saw a video the other day where someone put an SSD in an old MacOS Classic Mac, and I got to wondering how Mac OS’s virtual memory would work on that and if it would cause issues with SSD longevity*), but there’s a lot of enabling technology that supports it.
* SSD on Mac OS Classic is already slightly dodgy, since Mac OS Classic doesn’t support TRIM for solid state storage. That means that file operations are probably poorly suited for wear leveling, for one thing.
Not a fan of it being tied to that Stage Manager view, but much better than nothing. I’m interested to see how the other “desktop-class app” features improve. External display support is huge, but won’t change a lot of the little limitations of iPadOS that wear you down over time.
There is plenty on my 2015 pro. Like mail is a mess. It is a struggle to copy and paste an email address from an email into a new email (just did it today). Lots of small examples like that one. Have to wait to go home and do certain tasks.
Can you walk me through what you mean by the email problem? I opened Mail on my iPhone, tapped the sender field, tapped and held on the sender name, a contacts sheet popped up, and I just tapped and held the email field then hit copy. It’s a lot of steps, yes, but I wasn’t sure it could be done and I was able to figure out how to do it in less than a minute just from being very familiar with iOS.
(Edit: I actually had to do something similar with Android a few weeks ago, and I’m much less familiar with Android than I am with iOS. It began with the person telling me what they needed to do, and I thought “I’d imagine Android probably has a way of doing this, it would be weird if it didn’t”. Then I poked around [and tapped and held obvious-seeming interaction targets] and figured out how to do the thing the person I was helping wanted, only took me a couple minutes. I share this experience to briefly demonstrate my problem solving technique on phones and/on computers in general.)
I suppose you could also be talking about an issue with smart text, but I was able to tap and hold an email address in my email and select copy from the contextual menu.
To be fair, if you’re super experienced with desktop OSes and don’t have the same level of experience with iOS/iPadOS, it might not be intuitive to try to tap and hold an email address or the sender name in the sender field.
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I’d imagine it’s compatible with any Thunderbolt 3 display the iPad Pro already supports.
Someone has to explain how the A12Z iPad Pro version doesn't support this when the ARM Dev Kit Mac mini was based on the A12Z, meaning the A12Z is fully capable of the same stuff M1 is. Hopefully Apple will backtrack like last year (they brought some stuff announced only for M1 to intel in later betas). All iPad Pro's should have this feature, it's called the 'Pro'. Don't make me spend another $1000 or more on a new model when you promised the 'Pro' model when first launched in 2015 would bring. desktop experience to the iPad for Pro users and never delivered until now.
Yes but only on M1 models according to the Apple Preview site. They just gave every other 'Pro' model user the big finger...
18 months from the last model... The iPad Pro is on a 18 month release cycle...
I've got a non M1 iPad Pro. I'm going to hold off a few years on any upgrade. I'm pretty sure based on past experience that when this feature rolls out there will be a lot of bumps in the road and roadblocks to using it consistently across your apps. Third party apps have to be updated to support this, and some will take a long time or never happen. So it will be a few years before you can use this relatively seamlessly across all your favorite apps.
My example is drag-and-drop. I still find tons of instances where it doesn't work at all. What good is windowing if I can't drag and drop things and expect it will work every time? It's things like this that make me turn back to my PC for serious work.
I like where Apple is going, but the path is painfully slow to reach maturity.
This really makes anyone want to buy another iPad again. I have the 2020 model which is 2 years old only and has the A12Z, the ARM dev kit had the A12Z in it, how is it not supported by this feature... The iPad is NOT a phone and we shouldn't have to upgrade it every year like one... This feature should be in all Pro models, we paid for a Pro model iPad.