Apple Explains Why Stage Manager is Limited to M1 iPads in New Statement

[threesixty360]

Stop pulling non-sense out of thin air. OS X at its core has pre-emptive multitasking and memory management since it’s inception. It’s the core reason Apple even bought NeXTStep. iOS itself can’t even be used to develop apps, something a Mac from 12 years can do and publish to any platform today. The fact that a 2017 MacBook Pro, which a M1 iPad Pro beats in performance scores can use Stage Manager while a 2017 or an iPad as recent as 2020 can’t shows how ridiculous this really is.

Yes OS X has that. iOS is a subset of OS X, it’s not the full OS. Up until recently the system was designed to run 1 app at a time. Which is why when developing iOS apps you have to make sure you store the state of the app because it could be swapped out as main app at any time. That’s also why there are a dedicated set of api’s that you can use for background jobs.
IOs basically doesn’t let you just run multiple apps in the background like OS X does.

And it’s done this so no background tasks hog the memory and slow down your phone / iPad. That’s why on android which acts like a traditional OS, many people end up killing background tasks to keep their system responsive.

Apple famously says on iOS you don’t have to kill apps. As no app is really “running” when it’s not in view.

Your doing the basic , my machine can do xyz without understanding the underlying design and why it’s been done like that.

I don’t think it’s impossible for Apple to allow apps to multitask without restriction like on macOS. When iPads were jailbroken thats one of the first things people did. But the way iOS deals with memory means that it’s not consistent or safe for apps to do that.

And I have iMac i5 with 24gb of ram, running clean my mac which pretty much always comes up with a message saying I’m running out of memory if I have lots of apps open. And the OS slows down and is unresponsive. I see this all the time. Sometimes it’s hard force quit apps. Sometimes the app itself just locks (Apple Music for example). That never happens on my iPad Pro.

So I have no idea what your talking about. Have you never seen a mac slow down and be unresponsive? Like ever? Must be running a 10 grand mac studio or something!

 

[hans1972]

You manage to be both insulting and wrong. I am not disputing that the only iPads capable of running Stage Manager are M1 iPads (this may or may not be the case and this statement from Apple does not address this question). Apple didn't say that non-M1 iPads were incapable of running Stage Manager - they merely stated that M1 iPads can run Stage Manager.

Very different thing - and somewhat telling.

I agree, but my statement was trying to translate Apple's statement into why older iPads aren't supported.

If speed and performance wasn't important, almost all iPads from the last 10 years could support multitasking of applications.

 

[dk001]

I just wanna say I respect and listen to all the opinions here, justifications on both sides of argument are strong.

I’m just challenging everyone here to “Think Different”

As a 2020 IPad Pro user I did try to “Think Different” and adapt my IPP as my laptop, or as much as I could. Didn’t work.
It is concerning moving forward as I look at my 1+ year old IPP and find Apple saying “We are adding new “pro” capabilities but won’t allow it on prior gen hardware because of [insert Marketing Reason here]”.

 

[landi.erik]

As a 2020 IPad Pro user I did try to “Think Different” and adapt my IPP as my laptop, or as much as I could. Didn’t work.
It is concerning moving forward as I look at my 1+ year old IPP and find Apple saying “We are adding new “pro” capabilities but won’t allow it on prior gen hardware because of [insert Marketing Reason here]”.

And let’s not kid around of course things will be faster with new silicon that makes sense, its fragmenting a feature that should have been fixed years ago.

 

[dk001]

The people who wants to run virtual machines on phones and tablets are exactly the type of people Apple should avoid having as customers.

Here's a list of people I would be extremely happy lost confidence in Apple and removed themselves from the Apple ecosystem:

• Wants touch-screen support on Macs
• Wants be in full control of their iOS and iPad OS devices
• Wants Apple to design their products to be easily repaiable
• Right-to-repair people
• Wants iOS to be more like Android
• Wants macOS to be more like Windows
• Wants Apple to be more like Microsoft, Google or PC manufacturers
• Wants to run virtual machines on simple iOS and iPad OS devices
• and the list goes on

Difficult to say which one of them I hate the most, but very often the same person holds all of the above beliefs.

Since you seem to be in the minority, grab a horse …

 

[seek3r]

There ARE sites that help folks that have a strong fear of missing out.

MacRumors Buyer's Guide: Know When to Buy iPhone, Mac, iPad

This page provides a product summary for each Apple model. The intent is to provide our best recommendations regarding current product cycles, and to provide a summary of currently available rumors for each model. This page is based on rumors and speculation and we provide no guarantee to its...

buyersguide.macrumors.com

Anyone that checked 3 months ago would likely have seen “Don’t Buy”. Anyone that MUST have the latest but then doesn’t check to see if what they’re buying is the latest… well that’s on them.

I think you missed the point my dude: the 4th gen iPAs have a long while to go before they are anywhere near end of support

 

[rafark]

It has a 3-year old CPU and 3Gb RAM. It's a great device, don't get me wrong, but nothing in it is exactly "new".

Apple is selling it as a new device. And the chip is plenty powerful. You’d expect a 10 inch iPad that was released a few months ago to have this new feature. Some would say the base iPad is not a pro device, but let’s be honest, multi tasking is not really a “pro” feature. Media devices could absolutely benefit from this as well.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Yes OS X has that. iOS is a subset of OS X, it’s not the full OS. Up until recently the system was designed to run 1 app at a time. Which is why when developing iOS apps you have to make sure you store the state of the app because it could be swapped out as main app at any time. That’s also why there are a dedicated set of api’s that you can use for background jobs.
IOs basically doesn’t let you just run multiple apps in the background like OS X does.

And it’s done this so no background tasks hog the memory and slow down your phone / iPad. That’s why on android which acts like a traditional OS, many people end up killing background tasks to keep their system responsive.

Apple famously says on iOS you don’t have to kill apps. As no app is really “running” when it’s not in view.

Your doing the basic , my machine can do xyz without understanding the underlying design and why it’s been done like that.

I don’t think it’s impossible for Apple to allow apps to multitask without restriction like on macOS. When iPads were jailbroken thats one of the first things people did. But the way iOS deals with memory means that it’s not consistent or safe for apps to do that.

And I have iMac i5 with 24gb of ram, running clean my mac which pretty much always comes up with a message saying I’m running out of memory if I have lots of apps open. And the OS slows down and is unresponsive. I see this all the time. Sometimes it’s hard force quit apps. Sometimes the app itself just locks (Apple Music for example). That never happens on my iPad Pro.

So I have no idea what your talking about. Have you never seen a mac slow down and be unresponsive? Like ever? Must be running a 10 grand mac studio or something!

I have seen both macOS and iOS slow down. In fact, I have had to restart my iPad more than my Mac because it just becomes unresponsive or apps hang up. In fact, one of the biggest issues I have with iOS is the Wallet app periodically freezing. On macOS, all I have to do is force quit the app and move on. Not on iOS, its like its using corporative multi-tasking forcing me to bring down the whole OS.

Anyway, the point is there is no excuse for this and the one Apple is providing is lame. They just want to sell more hardware. They know people are keeping their older models longer, so they just introduce arbitrary requirements. At the end of the day, Stage Manager is not gonna force a lot of people to buy new iPads. The vast majority still use their iPad for consumption, so, using the Dock, Swipe up gesture or double pressing the Home button works just fine.

I manage over 16,000 iOS devices in a critical care environment and most are older generation, so, its not like this is gonna mission critical feature.

 

[dk001]

I’ve actually not known any software company that doesn’t define “system requirements” right up front. Which would include which devices it is expected to run on. So that folks don’t build for a phone and then find out at the end that the “device” was supposed to be a mainframe.

That for me evolved into the second step.
Step one was user reqs. If there are specific system reqs those are part of this step.

Now for this maybe Apple did say we are building this for the M1 and beyond however the code and comments do not support that Assumption.

 

[kc9hzn]

They could have probably made the feature work on older iPad Pro's without the external display support, but you could still have it on the device.

The 2018/2020 were pretty powerful chips.

Well, it’s not so simple. Apple points out that, with the VM swap feature, each application running (out of the 8 that can run simultaneously) can request 16GB. 16*8=128 That means that the M1 iPad can use 128GB of memory between the 12GB of RAM and the storage. I do doubt that the A15 could handle that large of a memory map in the time needed to swap in and out applications.

Could Apple adopt just the UI view and multiple display support for non-M1 iPads? Probably, yes. I suspect, though, that they felt that the virtual memory feature is so essential for getting the feature working well that they didn’t want to support what they view as a half baked version of Stage Manager on pre-M1 iPads. And the improvement in multiple monitor support is tied into Stage Manager in part because the iPad without Stage Manager doesn’t have much of a UI outside of the home screen (which mostly makes sense on a touch screen anyway). The Mac can extend the desktop, duplicate the dock, extend the menu bar, etc. Prior to iOS 16, the iPad can really only display an application.

 

[landi.erik]

Well, it’s not so simple. Apple points out that, with the VM swap feature, each application running (out of the 8 that can run simultaneously) can request 16GB. 16*8=128 That means that the M1 iPad can use 128GB of memory between the 12GB of RAM and the storage. I do doubt that the A15 could handle that large of a memory map in the time needed to swap in and out applications.

Could Apple adopt just the UI view and multiple display support for non-M1 iPads? Probably, yes. I suspect, though, that they felt that the virtual memory feature is so essential for getting the feature working well that they didn’t want to support what they view as a half baked version of Stage Manager on pre-M1 iPads. And the improvement in multiple monitor support is tied into Stage Manager in part because the iPad without Stage Manager doesn’t have much of a UI outside of the home screen (which mostly makes sense on a touch screen anyway). The Mac can extend the desktop, duplicate the dock, extend the menu bar, etc. Prior to iOS 16, the iPad can really only display an application.

We know at least 3 applications can be run simultaneously on A-X/Z using split-screen and Slide Over.

 

[kc9hzn]

This statement would be more believable if Apple simply showed us how bad it would be running it on the A12X/Z (eg super choppy animation, apps crashing due to low RAM, etc). Simply demo it and say “see, this is why we require the M1.” Done. People would be more than willing to accept and even upgrade. Be transparent.

But no, Apple won’t do that, because they probably know it can be worked out if they wanted to. Put a limit on how many apps retained, and/or cut down some of the eye candy, or just have it not support external monitor in the older iPads.

It would be hilarious if somebody managed to jailbreak the older iPads and then enable the feature, and then it worked fine.

What I think most people miss about the A12Z is that we don’t know whether the DTK Mac used a stock A12Z. Given the small numbers of Macs necessary for the DTK, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple manufactured a small batch of custom A12Zs with additional hardware features for macOS memory management.

 

[kc9hzn]

We know at least 3 applications can be run simultaneously on A-X/Z using split-screen and Slide Over.

Running 3 apps under the constraints of a 2GB or 4GB RAM iPad is dramatically different than 8 apps claiming 16GB a piece. Remember, even just 16GB is more storage than the M1 iPad Pro even has physical memory, let alone every application claiming 16GB. The A12Z likely can’t swap in and out storage memory so quickly.

 

[rafark]

Multitasking on IOS was possible in 2007 on the first iPhone. It was built into the OS. In fact, the OS itself is multitasking.

Not true. Multitasking was introduced in iOS 4 alongside background images. The first iPhones closed the app the moment you hit the home button if I recall correctly

 

[AlexMac89]

View attachment 2018276
View attachment 2018278

Ran 2 runs off My iPad Pro 11’ 2020 with 256GB storage and 6GB RAM. Write is about 75% ish of M1 and Read is 35-40% ish. I really don’t think that’s an enough difference just on RAW read\write performance. So again makes me think this is artificial.

I’m not sure how having read speeds 1/3 of the M1 iPad is insignificant when a major supporting function of said feature is the swap file that will support the expanded memory overhead to keep applications open simultaneously and fluid (while supporting full external display support at 6k).

 

[I7guy]

Okay I definitely agree that’s the explanation they are using but I don’t take their word for it. Not after looking at declining iPad sales and the fact most iPad customers upgrade +2 year basis. I mean kinda great timing to say this on the investor call and then magically have a feature that only works with latest gen iPad.

Wasn’t it said part of the decline was attributed to component shortages? I don’t think it matters to apple who believes them. (Unless it’s a majority of their customers…Although I’m sure apple is aware of threads on Macrumors but who knows if they take requirements from these threads)

 

[Rafterman]

The people who wants to run virtual machines on phones and tablets are exactly the type of people Apple should avoid having as customers.

Actually, being able to run MacOS, Windows or Linux on an iPad as a virtual maxchine would be pretty cool.

 

[alien3dx]

Per Fortune, in 2021, Windows has nearly 70% compared to Linux's 20% currently, with Linux forecasted to have by 2029 the highest market share.

we do think those data is fake.

1. How hard to get windows VPS. Azure pricing is horrible overprice.
2. Asp.net could run in linux and sql server also now in linux flavour for sure people rather stable linux then windows.
3. 95% here using linux server rather then windows because of costing.
4. 4 GB ram windows server totally horrible , you need at least 8 to 16 GB ram to go.. mean While 4 GB for linux is awesome.. Even stack overflow whom support asp.net use some linux for their infra.

 

[sorgo †]

Almost 900 comments StageManagerGate is going to the moon! 🚀

 

[ian87w]

I’m not sure how having read speeds 1/3 of the M1 iPad is insignificant when a major supporting function of said feature is the swap file that will support the expanded memory overhead to keep applications open simultaneously and fluid (while supporting full external display support at 6k).

The Pro ipads have had nvme storage, which is desktop class storage speed. It might be slower than the M1, but that's still desktop class. If that's considered slow, how would stage manager work on Intel Macs that use nvme storage?

 

[ian87w]

Almost 900 comments StageManagerGate is going to the moon! 🚀

And it's all just because Apple decided to make up some "technical" BS excuses that made people question the decision more. Imo Apple should've just maintained status quo by staying silent (eg Apple didn't bother providing excuses why they dropped iphone 7 from iOS 16). Then people would e just shrugged it off after a while. Now, it only invited more scrutiny.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Almost 900 comments StageManagerGate is going to the moon! 🚀

In the grand scheme of things, it will eventually die down and Apple will end up selling millions of iPads anyway. For those of us who are a little more conservative, we are just gonna have suck it. I noticed since I upgraded to iOS 15 on my 2017 iPad Pro 12.9, its just been absolutely groggy and I have to periodically restart it to clear the RAM. Feels like Windows 98. You can sure bet iPadOS 17 is dropping my iPad next year.

 

[tobybrut]

This may add some perspective for 2020 owners. The 2020 iPad Pro (which was essentially the 2018 model with some new lipstick) was released in March of that year. If you wait to upgrade to the M2 IPP, with its rumored redesign coming out in September, that would make 30 months between devices (assuming you bought the 2020 soon after release). That’s not so terrible in the fast-moving, ever-changing world of iPad.

What to know what IS terrible? Try this: I was one of those who bought the snail-slow iPad 3 on day one, only to be highly annoyed when Tim Cook announced the iPad 4 with greatly improved speed (plus lightning port upgrade) only 6 months later! Now THAT qualifies as a “sucker punch” by Apple.

I had that happen to me as well. It wasn't nearly as bad as back in the 80's I bought a Mac IIcx for $6,000. A few months later, Apple released the Mac IIci. The iPad was only a few hundred dollars. We're talking about a 16MHz computer versus a 25MHz computer that came out less than six months apart for the cost of $6,000. Macs were a lot more expensive back then when John Sculley ran Apple.

 

[HiVolt]

Well, it’s not so simple. Apple points out that, with the VM swap feature, each application running (out of the 8 that can run simultaneously) can request 16GB. 16*8=128 That means that the M1 iPad can use 128GB of memory between the 12GB of RAM and the storage. I do doubt that the A15 could handle that large of a memory map in the time needed to swap in and out applications.

Here's why I don't buy it. Stage Manager is supported on Intel Macs with MacOS Ventura. And the lowest supported Mac is a 12" MacBook from 2017. And that runs a POTATO of a fanless piece of crap Intel Core m3 CPU with horrible graphics and overall performance.

And yet that somehow can run Stage Manager, while also running an entire full desktop MacOS.

An A12Z can run circles around that machine.

 

[tobybrut]

Sounds more like a Marketing sound bite than a real explanation.

Of course it does. Would you really want an engineer to write your company press releases? No one except another engineer would understand it. Fortunately I'm an engineer and I perfectly understood the translation from marketing speak to engineering speak, so I know what Apple was trying to say.