Wait, there’s another user that just posted that Apple’s added this feature specifically to cajole people into upgrading their iPads!! So, it HAS to work. It’s just GOT to! /s
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Apple Explains Why Stage Manager is Limited to M1 iPads in New Statement
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Have YOU used it? Do you have it working wirelessly, or through a computer?
So we’re designing features exclusively for the current generation of hardware now? That’s a decision, all right.
So non-M1 iPads can run the entirety of iPadOS exactly as it is on the M1 iPad but one singular multi-tasking window function is the straw that broke the camel's back?
If there was that much of a difference in graphical capacity, we'd see it in many, many more (and obvious) ways than just one window management feature. This is clearly an intentional software lock-out.
Shrinkydinks on OSX was just a window manager, the base OS handled multi-tasking and virtual memory; same is true for Stage Manager on Ventura. Stage Manager on iPad is multitasking, window manager, and virtual swap memory all rolled into a single environment/application. When using an external display, it's the Stage Manager environment/application you see, not iPadOS, which is why other parts of iPadOS like split screen don't work on external displays.
Stage Manager without multitasking was probably an inferior experience. The windows don't have labels and suspended application windows would show up as blank rectangles. Hardly a good experience.
I can't say for sure why the A12Z didn't get Stage Manager, but Apple's reasons sound more legitimate than nefarious.
A point that would also hold water if the silicon necessary had not already been released.
I vote with the wallet of others.
That's always been a thing with every OS. For example, previous iPhones don't get the latest computational photography software.
It's also a decision to vote with your wallet for another device as a result of dumb business decisions from Apple.
And those reasons may be very legitimate...
Right? Even though the iPads are obviously capable machines, with even base models having live text, or shooting 8 simultaneous photos at the same time to generate an hdr image (which is VERY INTENSIVE, but the iPad does that without a sweat), some users either believe or want to lead us to believe those models can't handle basic multitasking.
We're being indirectly called stupid.
Quote:
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Stage Manager is a fully integrated experience that provides all-new windowing experience that is incredibly fast and responsive and allow users to run 8 apps simultaneously across iPad and an external display with up to 6K resolution. Delivering this experience with the immediacy users expect from iPad's touch-first experience requires large internal memory, incredibly fast storage, and flexible external display I/O, all of which are delivered by iPads with the M1 chip.
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Multitasking and and multi-processor services have existed since the past millennium and ran on some fairly ancient (by today's standards) architecture, so I'll "call" nonsense on those parts of their reply that such cannot be accomplished with their current and recent (read: iOS capable) hardware. IMHO, as I read their comment, it's more a case of "won't" not "can't".
Link to some, er, "ancient" text (for educational purposes)...
Document Revision History
(This table describes the changes to Multiprocessing Services Programming Guide.)
Document Revision History
Explains how to implement preemptive tasks in Carbon applications.developer.apple.com
But nothing in Apple's statement mentions multitasking or running multiple processes at once.
The limiting factors are memory, fast I/O to both internal storage and external screen.
We still have some old Windows 98 computers at work used to run expensive machinery. They’re much slower than even an iPad 3 running iOS 9.
Correct but the A12Z in the MacMini also had 16GB of RAM.
This is a business decision, through and through. Anyone who argues otherwise is really chugging the Koolaid.
That really is the key part of the story here.
It's rather breathtaking actually and I certainly hope is just a one off.
My optimistic case is that they've decided on a different direction for the iPads and realized more baseline spec power will need to be the norm moving forward and thus they're moving aggressively on that here this one time.
But -- this can't be the new way of doing things.
Do I believe they could have gotten this to work on older SoCs? I think they just didn’t want to do it. Not spend the resources to optimise for lower-powered - and/or compromise on the user experience for users that pushed the feature. They‘d rather have a new feature run buttery smooth in virtually all scenarios - than provide a useful feature that stutters under heavier load / memory usage.
While personally I did exactly that (though even coming from a 2020 iPad Air), I don’t think that many others will.
Yeah, I’m a sucker. Thanks for pointing it out.
That said, I’ll suck it up rather gladly. Better external display support and scaling are the killer feature (for me) I‘ve missed until now.
If one needs MacOS (or at least any desktop OS), I don’t believe iPads will be under consideration at all.
Stage Manager doesn’t magically convert the iPad into a Mac.
Voting with your wallet is a weak argument. There is nothing wrong with Apple arbitrarily requiring new hardware to use new features. The issue is that their newest hardware doesn't support it.
Of the three newest iPads only one has an M1 processor.
Apple does this regularly if some influential Youtuber or Twitter user makes it an issue.
They then provide a statement usually through Rene Ritchie or Matthew Panzarino at Techcrunch. Sometimes they use John Gruber.
So they need M1 Pro level hardware to run stage manager at 120FPS /s
Got it.
The current iPad Pro and the new iPad Air both have the m1 processor.
It does seem like they could have at least added some of the functionality, like true external monitor support, to the A12Z and more.
The iPad Pro's are the oldest iPads in the lineup. The mini and iPad are much newer and neither have the M1.
But they never actually put out a specific and official statement “explaining” their reasons. They just did it, and some people might wondered why, but most would shrug it off. Putting out a specific statement and pretending to be technical about it would only draw more scrutiny on the decision, imo.
Yes, so half their lineup has the M1 processor. I can't imagine the stage manager experience on the mini would be all that great either.