Isn’t that exactly what many vocal members of the M1 iPad community did? I’m sure their tune would have stayed the same had the majority of current iPad models and past Pros gotten (some form of) Stage Manager. Gotta feel different, special, “elite” to justify their $1,000+ toys.
Can you imagine the uproar if they had announced the M2 iPad Pro and limited these features just to that model?
For me my 2018 iPP is still a decent consumption device and I only really use apps full screen anyway, on Windows which is a multitasking OS i maximise pretty much everything. I am annoyed at the lack of 2nd screen support for the scenario I gave above, but the flashy Stage Manager I would almost never use.
However I have always thought that my iPP was a supremely powerful device held back by its OS and I really hate to see stuff not used to its full potential. The iPP has been close to being a full laptop replacement for a lot of people for years but stupid OS decisions really hold it back. The Max Tech video above gives some good examples such as needing a Mac to run first aid on a corrupted drive or to format a drive etc.
The problem I am seeing in this thread is people quite rightly criticising Apple for decisions that appear to be a case of trying to sell you new hardware even if you have perfectly capable hardware already, and then the Apple defenders where almighty god Tim cannot do wrong, but if Apple had said the new features were M2 iPad only then they would be complaining like us A series iPad owners.
The people saying don’t buy a device hoping for features were probably also the people complaining that the M1 iPad didn’t justify its M1 chip prior to iPadOS 16. The M1 is pretty much just an A14X anyway, it is an evolution of the A12X which if you read the old Ars article that someone posted on one of these threads is where all the unified memory architecture began.
The issue for a lot of people is for years Apple have been selling these iPads as “computers” and comparing the performance of them to high end laptops, which if the iPad was running macOS would’ve been a valid comparison.
However as it stands my 2018 iPP is far more powerful than my wife’s 2020 intel MacBook Air but is nowhere near as productive due to OS limitations. People like me saw iPadOS 16 with its new features as a way of justifying the iPad’s huge performance somewhat and to bring it closer to the Mac and are quite rightly annoyed that hardware that is perfectly capable is being kicked to the side and still not getting to live up to its full potential.
Now to put this into perspective the 2018 iPP has a chip that was compared to a 7th Generation intel core i7 with Xbox One S level of graphics, now are you really telling me that all that power cannot run Teams on one screen and Safari on another?
As for the 4GB of RAM issue they could’ve added swap too as the A12Z would’ve had it in the DTK as part of macOS even if it did have 16GB of RAM. I’ve looked at benchmarks for the SSD in the 2018 iPP and it would be more than capable of running Swap as PC’s have been doing it with spinning rust at sub 100MB/s speeds for years, Android phones run swap on eMMC which is even slower, and the 2018 iPP has a write speed of around 300MB/s which is more than capable.
I’ve said it before in these threads but this is an iPadOS release by the bean counters to try and flog more iPads and during a global recession its a nasty move at a time where people have less spending power and are trying to maximise the lifespans of their devices, especially when the hardware is as powerful as the iPad Pro.
Also to the person above comparing it to buying an older car and complaining it doesn’t have the latest features, cars can be upgraded. My car didn’t have CarPlay it does now so that argument is garbage.
Apple could potentially solve this issue by unlocking the hardware to install alternative OS’s after they give up on them, I bet the 2018 iPP even with its measly 4GB of RAM could run the Arm version of Windows far better than even some of the latest Arm chips for windows.
If you had a non M1 Mac you could install Windows or Linux on it after MacOS support ended, I had a 2012 MacBook pro that I had upgraded to an SSD and stuck 8GB of RAM in it and it was running the latest build of Windows 10 at the time extremely well long after macOS support ended.