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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Apple Explains Why iPad Multitasking Took So Long to Arrive
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Craig has a point that the early iPad hardware was fairly limited. It was essentially a big iPhone. The A12X is the first iPad processor with desktop capabilities.
I need the Finder. Otherwise I don’t have much use for the iPad
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.
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.
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.
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.
Multiple user login is also entirely feasible - it’s just greed that’s preventing the feature. At the very least, they could allow a Guest mode.
The remaining issue is that they still don’t have a proper file system like on any real computer. The files app doesn’t cut it.
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.
Why do you think we don't have Finder-equivalents in the App Store? Are such functions just blocked by SDK?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 🤷♂️
They should have given us that instead of Stage Manager in the first place. iPads have been powerful enough for that for
years already.
years already.
It's been fun watching Craig and Joz hem and haw, BS and lie their @ss off in their sorry/not sorry "Not Going To Apologize" tour.
