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I'm surprised they kept stage manager around. That's probably less used than Rosetta2, and they have no problems killing that.
I use it as it is useful with an external display. I haven’t tried the iPadOS 26 beta so if the new method works better I’ll stop using stage manager. But I think the two can work together, right? Meaning I can have multiple “stages” with multiple windowed apps.
 
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Oh come on. The real reason is they didn't want ipad sales cannibalizing macbook sales. End of story.
When has Apple ever cared about cannibalizing their own sales, especially when an iPad with keyboard costs more than a MacBook Air? In fact, an iPad Pro 13” by itself costs more than a MBA. If they were truly worried about Mac sales, they would have restricted this new multitasking to the iPad Pros. Instead, they extended it down to the cheapest iPad. That should prove definitively that Apple wasn’t even thinking of Mac sales. This has always been a terrible reason for why Apple didn’t want to implement their new multitasking until now. I doubt this change, which is only wanted by a tiny number of tech enthusiasts, will affect Mac sales at all.

Non techies, which I call normies, are not even remotely interested in these new features. I’m one of the few exceptions. I’m a techie, but hate the new changes because it guts the old multitasking. If they had kept the old iPadOS 18 multitasking as a separate mode instead of the very limited full-screen mode, I wouldn’t have any complaints.

The old multitasking is just simpler and more convenient.
 
Highly unlikely. If anything iPad sales will drop. There just aren’t that many enthusiasts looking for these new multitasking features. Normies just don’t care about the new stuff and never run more than one or two apps at a time. The loss of multitasking simplicity on the iPad may end up costing sales among normies while boosting sales among tech enthusiasts. But since normies vastly outnumber enthusiasts, sales could actually suffer.

Don’t take MacRumors or any other tech forum as representative of the population at large.
When you start up iPadOS 26 for the first time it asks the user to choose between Full Screen Apps, Windowed Apps, or Stage Manager. So no, traditional use of iPads will be unchanged unless the user chooses to.
 
Oh come on. The real reason is they didn't want ipad sales cannibalizing macbook sales. End of story.

The iPad will NEVER cannibalizing Mac Sales. iPadOS will never become MacOS.

It will however have the best of both worlds making iPadOS the best tablet OS

1. Mac's use SSD with significant R/W speeds.
2. MacOS supports the game porting toolkit which is easier to work with from Dev standpoint.
3. MacOS will always have the higher RAM.
4. Mac's will always be cheaper.
5. The incredible thin design of the iPad will always present issues with displacing heat. Even with copper vapor chamber, heat will still be an issue.
6. Macs will always support multi-IO ports

Where the iPad excels at the Macs lack.

1. 5G support
2. NAND storage. Less potential for "SSD failure"
3. Insanely portable & lightweight
 
If iPad mostly used as reading tablet (like iPad mini - in my case), I don’t think this new window system and files app improvement will make significant change to my workflow. I am worried the new glass interface will tax lots of CPU, which is nothing important for a reading tablet device.
 
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Very true.

One question when I installed and started beta 1 on my M4 iPad Pro I was not given option to choose but found out later however I loved how it worked on my M4 13 inch iPad Pro defaulted to the stage manager mode with most options for me. Maybe with M4 it just defaults does it ask on the less capable iPad devices? Just curious for some friends of mine who are not using M series iPads yet
Interesting. I'm going to get the mini (A17 Pro) soon, so I'll be curious to see if the same thing happens there. I suspect it'll use the choice screen because Apple may lean the A-series iPads towards a simpler use profile. I know that Apple limits external display support for those iPads (mirrored) compared to the extended desktops on the Pro/Air M-series.
 
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When you start up iPadOS 26 for the first time it asks the user to choose between Full Screen Apps, Windowed Apps, or Stage Manager. So no, traditional use of iPads will be unchanged unless the user chooses to.
Not true. When it says full-screen, they mean full-screen. It has completely removed the old multitasking. You cannot have two apps up at once. One of the most common things I do is to pull a tab off of Safari into its own instance and use split-screen on two Safari windows. You can no longer do that. Split screen and slide over are completely gone. The three dots that let you switch between app instances is also gone. The only way to get to a separate instance of Safari (or other apps that let you run more than one copy) is to go into Expose and swipe until you find the right one. That becomes a royal pain because you may have to go through dozens of apps before you find what you’re looking for while swiping.
 
I need the Finder. Otherwise I don’t have much use for the iPad
The files app is the Finder

I'm not sure what exactly is "needed" that did not get fixed with OS 26

Root access. 99% of users on both Windows and MacOS don't even know how to get root access. Even if they did, they end up complaining their PC is ruined and have to reinstall the whole OS.

1749745028217.png
 
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Not true. When it says full-screen, they mean full-screen. It has completely removed the old multitasking. You cannot have two apps up at once. One of the most common things I do is to pull a tab off of Safari into its own instance and use split-screen on two Safari windows. You can no longer do that. Split screen and slide over are completely gone. The three dots that let you switch between app instances is also gone. The only way to get to a separate instance of Safari (or other apps that let you run more than one copy) is to go into Expose and swipe until you find the right one. That becomes a royal pain because you may have to go through dozens of apps before you find what you’re looking for while swiping.
A horribly confusing and error prone design. If the “normies” have such a hard time with multiple windows then the old slide-over design is actually worse. I can’t count the number of times I accidentally invoked slide-over or hit the stupidly placed three dot menu. Happy to never see it again.
 
Interesting. I'm going to get the mini (A17 Pro) soon, so I'll be curious to see if the same thing happens there. I suspect it'll use the choice screen because Apple may lean the A-series iPads towards a simpler use profile. I know that Apple limits external display support for those iPads (mirrored) compared to the extended desktops on the Pro/Air M-series.
On my iPad mini 7 it asked at first startup. I suspect that in the cases where it didn’t happen is a bug. It’s the first beta after all.
 
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If iPad mostly used as reading tablet (like iPad mini - in my case), I don’t think this new window system and files app improvement will make significant change to my workflow. I am worried the new glass interface will tax lots of CPU, which is nothing important for a reading tablet device.
Interestingly the Apple Books app doesn’t show any windowing controls on my iPad mini 7. I don’t know if it is intentional or a bug.
 
came here to say exactly this about the M1

as for iPadOS not being a multi-threaded operating system to begin with, of course it wasn't since it was based on iOS that was designed for phones first and foremost
iOS and iPadOS are perfectly capable running code on multiple threads but I’m not familiar with macOS enough to tell how different these capabilities are. I do remember that iOS is limited regarding the number of threads available when compared to macOS though
 
iPadOS 26 fixes the files app
The issue is not the files app. The issue is that apps do not have access to a general file system. This is a left over from the time when iPad had a totally sandboxed files system. So, some apps don’t work properly. As an example, you cannot properly access Dropbox files on an iPad.
 
The issue is not the files app. The issue is that apps do not have access to a general file system. This is a left over from the time when iPad had a totally sandboxed files system. So, some apps don’t work properly. As an example, you cannot properly access Dropbox files on an iPad.
What is “properly”? You can connect Dropbox in the Files app and access stuff there just fine, in my experience 🤷‍♂️
 
Interesting. I'm going to get the mini (A17 Pro) soon, so I'll be curious to see if the same thing happens there. I suspect it'll use the choice screen because Apple may lean the A-series iPads towards a simpler use profile. I know that Apple limits external display support for those iPads (mirrored) compared to the extended desktops on the Pro/Air M-series.
The screen is present on the iPad mini, huzzah.
 
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