How could you multitask effectively without tons of RAM?
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Apple Explains Why Stage Manager is Limited to M1 iPads in New Statement
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How could you multitask effectively without tons of RAM?
On one hand I'm glad my M1 iPad Pro is finally living up to some its potential. On the other hand the MacBook Air laptop (with the exception of internal cellular support) certainly seems much more versatile for the price. Note, I did add additional memory and storage to the M1 iPad. A gamble that has not really worked out. 
With my "hand on heart", I pledge to myself, I will in the future only buy for actual capabilities, not the hope that iOS/OS will catch up to the hardware's potential. I admit I got caught up in the Apple Silicon introduction frenzy.
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPad, but the next time around I'll be looking hard at the iPad vs. MacBook much harder. Again I will try not to get caught up in speculation of what the particular piece of hardware might attain with operating system upgrades. You'd think this original //+ buyer would have learned that by now. 😆
With my "hand on heart", I pledge to myself, I will in the future only buy for actual capabilities, not the hope that iOS/OS will catch up to the hardware's potential. I admit I got caught up in the Apple Silicon introduction frenzy.
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPad, but the next time around I'll be looking hard at the iPad vs. MacBook much harder. Again I will try not to get caught up in speculation of what the particular piece of hardware might attain with operating system upgrades. You'd think this original //+ buyer would have learned that by now. 😆
Good point, here. As there’s still a lot of discussion going on that will ensure that even more people are aware of iOS 16.
It certainly matters if you are going to run 8 applications simultaneously which can get 16Gb of RAM each.
Seriously, are people just forgetting all previous Windows versions? Of course it's possible to multitask without "tons of RAM".
But even that argument is bogus, because even the base iPad has e.g, 3 GB RAM. I think that's reasonably enough for at least basic multitasking.
For many years on all sorts of devices including their phones… and it only works with like 6 apps.
And why does 2022 Photoshop require a more powerful computer than Photoshop 3.0 which ran on Windows 3.1?
Seriously...
I see it as more like an automobile. You buy it as-is and it only has the features that it has at the time of purchase. When it can do new things, that’s a bonus. But cars (most of them, anyway) aren’t upgradable. When you need it to do something else, you replace it.
Apple has had this computer-as-an-appliance philosophy for decades. It’s nothing new. And it’s core to Apple. It makes them unique in the personal computing world. Right or wrong. And the marketplace says they’re right more than wrong.
And the computer (or iPad) you buy will do what it does for many, many years. The constant need for upgrades is not the fault of the device — it’s in your head. GM or Ford advertises the new best car same as Apple does with the new best iPad or Mac. Doesn’t mean your old car doesn’t get you from A to B any more. But the new car might do it with more style & comfort, or may go longer on a tank of gas, or may get from 0-60 faster. But your old car still runs the same as it did when you bought it. If you didn’t like it when you bought it, that’s on you. Same as a toaster. Same as a television.
Yes, the purpose of software is to be able to do something new without changing the hardware. But so much software is dependent on hardware, modern devices should be thought of as a package… an appliance, in Apple’s philosophy.
The Windows world, on the other hand, is built upon parts upgrades one by one, until the same computer is no longer the same computer. But when things start to run janky, people complain. So you get to complain that either your computer runs everything “new” in a slow, janky fashion (Windows) or you get to complain that it doesn’t do anything “new” at all (Apple) but that everything else works more or less as it did before.
But it's not only memory. When you are using swap, fast I/O is also important to "hide" the slowness of swap.
Yes. Apple said that External Display/Stage Manager/Virtual Swap Memory is an M1 feature.
Apple had ShrinkyDinks running on 2006 era Intel hardware. I'm sure they could figure out a way to make Stage Manager work for iOS if they wanted to.
They’re not happy about not being in the target demographic anymore. Apple didn’t tell them to get older
Does that even matter? The moment you switch from a task to another, you are multitasking. Apps in the iPhone / iPad in the background are in suspend mode. Stage Manager is just another way to organize that, so why can't Apple just generate a thumbnail of suspended apps?
If all that ******** about multitasking were true, you wouldn't be able to even switch apps, just like what you have on a desktop. But you can.
And at that time, a webpage wouldn't use 1Gb of RAM which can happened these days.
I mean these forum web pages easily use 250Mb of RAM.
Windows and macOS computers will slow down if you have too many memory demanding applications running at once. That's acceptably on these platforms, by tradition.
For Apple, it should be impossible to slow down the iPad by running more applications, which is why they have to restrict it to 8 applications, have a high minimum memory requirement and fast I/O.
Think about the changes which would be necessary to do to Windows and macOS if a slowdown wasn't allowed.
App Switching is not Multitasking. If that's what you think multitasking is, then you have no reason to complain because that's what iPad OS has had for a while. But really Multitasking is having more than one app running tasks simultaneously, and that's what Stage Manager does.
Suspending background apps is single-tasking, not multi-tasking. Stage Manager lets multiple apps run at the same time without suspending them. It uses the M1's swap memory like the M1 Macs do. In the past iOS allowed certain specific background processes to run without the full app running; this was mainly due to limited hardware specs. Stage Manager is Apple recognizing that hardware specs are no longer limiting background processes.
App Switching is not Multitasking.
You have no clue. It works with many apps. Most apps actually work with Dex but not all are optimized for it. Do you expect it will be any different on iPad? The rigid iOS UI is not going to smoothly scale to an arbitrary app window size.For many years on all sorts of devices including their phones… and it only works with like 6 apps.
Well, then use a Chromebook. They are pretty cheap and if they can do everything an iPad can do and better, why even use an iPad?
They did lead off with “large internal memory”. The M1 has a higher baseline of 8GB of RAM compared to the older SOCs.
I also think it might work on A12X and higher, but it might have been laggy with less than 8GB of RAM, depending on which apps you’re running and how high the resolution of the external monitor is. Some heavy apps today can use 5GB alone, so a 2018 iPad Pro with 4GB total RAM might have struggled a bit with these apps plus Stage Manager plus an external monitor.
400 million people aren’t going to upgrade their iPads for a superfluous feature, BUT, we can take a look at sales next year to see if this gets 400 million folks to upgrade. I doubt it, but I’m willing to give your “cajole existing owners” idea a run.Right. So Apple is incapable of making business decisions that cajole existing owners into upgrading their equipment when it might not be an engineering necessity. Because "loads of other people still haven't bought an iPad yet"
I’m thinking that a few million with old devices will get a new one that just so happens to have the feature and millions who’ve never owned an iPad before will buy their first iPad leading to roughly 40 million in sales, most of which won’t be able to use the new feature either. Check back next year!
From a DeX review.
Samsung DeX is limited to general office productivity applications such as word processing, emailing, and web browsing. Heavier tasks to include making a presentation, image editing, graphics, design, or video editing are impossible due to the lack of relevant Android apps and necessary optimization.
Any iPad app which was compatible with split-screen should be compatible with stage-manger. The apps were responsive and already deal successfully with different full scree aspect ratios, not to mention split-screen's dynamically changing window widths.
I think Apple has dropped the ball with this feature. It is so close to being something amazing and extremely functional. When plugged into an external display why can't we run a full MacOS like any other Apple computer? Unplug from the monitor and back to running in iPadOS mode. You can already use a keyboard and mouse, this stage manager is like a tease of what is so close to being something really usable. Regarding the hardware, I don't buy that stage manager is just too much for anything but an M1, just more Apple being Apple.