Apple Tested Stage Manager on iPads Without M1 Chip and Wasn't Satisfied

[sudo-sandwich]

stuff like this is never new.
iPhone 3G didn't get multitasking.

Unless you jailbroke it, which seemingly everyone did. Whatever, though, I don't expect an old phone to get supported like a new one.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

The 3G was too slow and had insufficient RAM anyway.

Mind, iirc, the OG iPhone never got the update with folder support that the iPhone 3G got even when they both had the same CPU and RAM.

It could take it. I was surprised at how capable my OG iPhone was when I jailbroke it and installed the kitchen sink.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

This stuff worked back in the days when hard drives spun, memory was measured in megabytes, and CPUs were still only 32-bit.

So did video calls on Flash-based AIM. Yet Google Meet will bring a top-spec MBP to its knees.

 

[rui no onna]

it becomes hard to make the argument that there is any value in buying an iPad Pro unless all of the features you need are present in the current, shipping model and OS.

To me, this should be a given. I wouldn't buy a $1000+ iPad if it couldn't do what I wanted it to do at time of purchase. If it gets new features, then that's a bonus.

Indeed, I even often kept iPhones and iPads running on older iOS versions so they don't slow down.

There's always something new around the corner. More often than not, it's more practical to just get the latest model when a feature you want is released rather than trying to future proof.

 

[steve09090]

If you are telling me the key features that make this “iPadOS” vs most of the same features that are shared with the phones are not supported after a couple years, it becomes hard to make the argument that there is any value in buying an iPad Pro unless all of the features you need are present in the current, shipping model and OS. Casualties of the march of progress may be an acceptable ethos for some, but if you burn too many people on high-dollar hardware purchases while doling out OS features at a snail’s-pace and narrowing support windows for key features, at some point, sales take a hit. The promise of iPadOS was that it would mature and it is not unreasonable for iPad customers to buy into the platform with the expectation they would grow with it.

It may be forgivable if this was a true architecture switch, the first version of “iPadOS” or some other significant update but this is a vertically integrated platform where Apple controls the roadmap and all the moving pieces. Apple has had no problems in the past introducing hardware support (lidar, UWB, 64-bit, etc.) for things that did not get supported in the OS until many years later for features that Apple wanted a large percentage of their customer base to enjoy.

Why would Apple compromise a previous version iPad when you don’t get the same experience as those on a later one, such as the M1?

Look, to be honest, I don’t make the rules. I don’t organise the upgrade road map. I’m not an engineer and think that the fact that they can fit a billion transistors into a chip is something from an alternative universe. I can’t even imagine what a billion anything actually looks like!

But what I do know is that if Apple says this is the way it is, then it must be true! 😂😂. I live with the consequences of my purchases and bask in the glory of technology!

 

[urnotl33t]

I have to be honest ... I don't care about this feature, neither on my Mac nor on iPad. I will continue using it as I did before, with the workflow that satisfies my needs.

I am not buying, the "other chips can't handle it" narrative, clearly, they want those who desire it, to go for more expensive models, which the M1 powered machines are. This is a marketing ploy, nothing more.

I suspect, most couldn't give a horses poop about it. My wife is a iPad Air 4 user, and really, she had absolutely 0 interest when I showed her the presentation, her comment: This will break what i did for so long and make me re-learn, i don't want it.

Wish, more attention was given to:

• Mac Mail/iOS and iPad OS mail - the attachment handling is pure rubbish, with auto-previews, hate it, was forced to pay for Canary. It's ugly, it looks outdated and new features they added, don't come close to what competition offers. Canary works well with Gmail conversation view, Apple can't seem to cross that bridge.
• Calendar - looks like an app from the 90s, has a buttload of bugs that exist since when I was still pretty.
• Notes - when making a list of groceries, wish it could autodetect if a item is already on my list and suggest to "untick it", google keep does this, and as much as I hate Google, this works very well.
• Reminders - useless and pointless app, that for a life of me, i can't figure out how to and why to use after years of being in Apple ecosystem. Met very few people who actually use it, got to admit, they can't live without it, god knows why.
• Apple Music - still can't search for a song inside a playlist/Album. Painfully slow.

But no, instead of fixing some of what we have, that has been relayed for years, they give us the Stage Manager. Let's just hope they don't put a "Notch" on it.

Agreed on just about all that.

As for Reminders, here's one way to consider it differently (if you're interested). I previously used Notes for grocery lists just as you wrote, until I realized how Reminders can do it.

Create a new list in Reminders, name it "Grocery".
Now tell Siri (our favorite town idiot):
Add peanut butter to my grocery list

Ta-da!
You can give a little pause for multiple items, but you gotta speak like she's a 3yr old, slowly:
Hey Siri, add bacon (half a second pause), eggs, (half second), and milk to my grocery list.

Three new list items added. This also works with your HomePod.

Assuming you have an Apple Watch, you get your new Grocery "reminder" list on your watch. Now you can stroll through the store with just your watch and tick off the items as you go.

Likewise, create a list named "Shopping". "Hey Siri, add sexy underwear to my shopping list".

No, it doesn't address your "untick the last one of the same name" request. Apple doesn't do that kind of parsing on-device (nor server-side, because of their ethos), so that won't happen any time soon.

You can make separate Reminder lists for those once-per-year items you have to do. (This is optional, and the items can live on your default list). I call that my "Adulting" list and those items repeat every 12 months (or every 3 months, whatever it may be).

I also take a weekly medication, which is refrigerated, so I need to take it out in the morning on "meds day". This reminder item has a weekly repeat. When it fires off, I'm the Pavlovian dog and take out my meds, then mark that notification as "Completed". That then resets the list item's reminder notification to next week; I don't make a new list entry. It's automatically adjusted.

You can create these with Siri, too: Hey Siri, remind me every Saturday at 9am to take meds out of the refrigerator. Boom. (Or do it manually).

Irregular repeats can be done, too: remind me every third Saturday to eat a watermelon.
Location-based reminders, too: "Remind me when I get home to watch paint dry".
Complex reminders with Siri: "remind me when I leave Megan's house or at 8pm to feed the cat". If you have Megan as a contact card, and a home address, Siri will link that and set you a location reminder, plus set that reminder to notify you at 8pm even if you haven't left Megan's home by that time. Even without Siri, you can do time+location reminders manually. Quite handy.

With location-based notifications, you can expand the geo-fence so the notification fires off when you're at a greater distance from the target spot. This works for departures, too.


"Reminders" app has a ton of stuff in it. 😆

 

[jamesrick80]

Almost seems like a decade since I brought this up, but all I want is a file manager and native drag And drop support plus the ability to transfer any files to iPAD OS and iOS and I then will once again buy a new iPad. Also, get rid of Quicktime.

 

[0194839]

I really don’t see the controversy here. Apple made a decision, deal with it! This is a typical first world problem. People act like Apple reduced their iPad to a Samsung tablet. Lol. They didn’t. It’s still an iPad folks.

 

[ian87w]

It is way for you to upgrade. It is like running windows 11, which requires you to have a new intel or AMD 5000 processor. I still have a self built PC with a AMD 1600. there is a way around this, and it works fine. Apple however has control over the whole ecosphere, so if you don't have a M1 iPad, your screwed. Probably the worst factor here is the educational market. Most school districts cannot afford the more expense M1 iPads. So, high school students or families that cannot afford more expense iPads are the real victims here. Funny how Apple paints this picture of equality, yet the poor individuals and families are forever locked out of gaining a foot hold in education, or to aspire to one day get a career in the tech industry.

For a lesser/entry level model to not get the fancy features is… somewhat more understandable. The problem is iPad Pro 2020, which was literally Apple’s flagship and expensive iPad before the M1 version. Sure, in reality it’s running a hardware from 2018, but Apple still released it as its top of the line iPad in 2020. I completely understand how users paying top dollar for the iPad Pro 2020 are upset.

 

[lowkey]

If you are telling me the key features that make this “iPadOS” vs most of the same features that are shared with the phones are not supported after a couple years, it becomes hard to make the argument that there is any value in buying an iPad Pro unless all of the features you need are present in the current, shipping model and OS. Casualties of the march of progress may be an acceptable ethos for some, but if you burn too many people on high-dollar hardware purchases while doling out OS features at a snail’s-pace and narrowing support windows for key features, at some point, sales take a hit. The promise of iPadOS was that it would mature and it is not unreasonable for iPad customers to buy into the platform with the expectation they would grow with it.

It may be forgivable if this was a true architecture switch, the first version of “iPadOS” or some other significant update but this is a vertically integrated platform where Apple controls the roadmap and all the moving pieces. Apple has had no problems in the past introducing hardware support (lidar, UWB, 64-bit, etc.) for things that did not get supported in the OS until many years later for features that Apple wanted a large percentage of their customer base to enjoy.

Nah. When I bought my iPad Pro, I bought it because of what it could do. Not for what someone might imagine could be done on it in the future.

Seriously, buying any tech for a feature it doesn’t have is pretty god damn stupid.

 

[coolfactor]

This guy is a clown. They've had the ability to do this for years now with lesser architecture so what he's really saying is that his team is so incompetent they can't figure out how to do something others did years ago

Spoken like a true software engineer that knows the inner workings of macOS from years of experience and hands-on development...

Or... ?

Yah, as a software engineer myself, I prefer to side with Apple on this one and I appreciate that they are holding the bar high.

 

[coolfactor]

So 6 GB of RAM and blasing fast iPad pro on previous generations are not enough to do a tiny new feature. This is the clear example of Planned Absoluteness.

So you look at product specs and believe that More RAM = More Performance, eh? Figured so.

This is not a "tiny new feature". Stage Manager is essentially keeping several apps running in the foreground at once vs. just one at a time as we've always had. This is essentially a multi-foreground feature, supporting up to four foreground apps at a single time, and bringing another four apps "to the stage" instantly requires a lot of fast processing. Not to mention the support for an entire second screen with the same features again.

So no, it's not a tiny new feature. It's a massive new way of interacting with apps.

 

[Mug_narwhal.0m]

I guess the maximum number of windows on non-M1 iPads is 4. 2 Split View, 1 Slide Over, and 1 Quicknote.

 

[KPOM]

Nah. When I bought my iPad Pro, I bought it because of what it could do. Not for what someone might imagine could be done on it in the future.

Seriously, buying any tech for a feature it doesn’t have is pretty god damn stupid.

Exactly. And everyone knew at the time that the 2020 iPad Pro was a very minor update to the 2018 iPad Pro. Apple had a very low key release, and rightfully so.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

No, they’re not.

The iPad lineup is more diversified than it has ever been before from price ranges and models offered.

It’s always entertaining to hear folks in the niche Mac market talk about a product that sells more units per year “niche”.

 

[alien3dx]

How about display scaling so we could fit more content on the screen? Even really old Macbooks supported it but 2020 iPads don't.

2011 with ssd it pretty fast for normal work (Before we use as temp android studio)(default 4 GB ram). With 16 GB much better upgrade before. Full screen , yeah normally.
** i think a lot of macbook air 4 GB also good maybe because it got ssd.

 

[iPadified]

If Apple really wanted to get people to update to newer iPads, releasing a feature that is too slow for some devices is a very powerful approach. This was the driver for PCs growth at least between 1990-2010.

My 2020 iPad still does exactly what is supposed to do, but I bought it for professional use that has not changed.

I do wish the people with MacOS/Win (old school GUI) preference would stick to their Macs and PCs and accept that there is another computing device around that is not for them. If the iPad triggers you so much, stop read and comment about it. You will be much happier.

 

[tmoerel]

Wow, I remember the times when these forums were about discussing real issues!!
Nowadays it seems it is just entitled millennial snowflakes spitting their dummies because they don't get what they feel they deserve.
Time to grow up you softies!!​

 

[Unregistered 4U]

For the iPad all we want is a dynamic context-based version of macOS and its file system with every advantage of a tablet. It’s too much to ask apparently.

Yah, Apple’s been quite successful keeping them separate and they’re selling more of the non-macOS iPads than Macs every year. There MAY be a time when the number of folks that want macOS on an iPad is large enough to make Apple take notice, but the vast majority of iPad users just want the iPad as the iPad.

 

[Naraxus]

Spoken like a true software engineer that knows the inner workings of macOS from years of experience and hands-on development...

Or... ?

Yah, as a software engineer myself, I prefer to side with Apple on this one and I appreciate that they are holding the bar high.

Since you've presented yourself as a software engineer here, why don't you go ahead and disprove what I said.

As I, and others have pointed out, the ability to do this has existed for years and it's worked out just fine.

 

[doubleout]

As more post-WWDC interviews with Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi surface, we continue to learn more about Apple's reasoning behind iPadOS's new Stage Manager feature being limited to iPads with the M1 chip.

The latest interview was published by Forbes contributor David Phelan, who asked Federighi if Apple attempted to make Stage Manager work with iPad models without the M1 chip. In response, Federighi said Apple did some early testing of the feature on other iPads, but Apple was not satisfied with the experienced delivered on those devices.

"We began some of our prototyping involving those systems and it became apparent early on that we couldn't deliver the experience that that we were designing toward with them," he said. "Certainly, we would love to bring any new experience to every device we can, but we also don't want to hold back the definition of a new experience and not create the best foundation for the future in that experience. And we really could only do that by building on the M1."

In an interview with TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino shared earlier this week, Federighi said the M1 chip's performance ensures that all apps being used in Stage Manager are "instantaneously responsive," as customers expect from a touch-based interface.

In a statement last week, shared by Rene Ritchie, Apple asserted that Stage Manager "requires large internal memory, incredibly fast storage, and flexible external display I/O, all of which are delivered by iPads with the M1 chip."

The M1 iPad Pro is available with up to 16GB of RAM and a Thunderbolt port, while the previous-generation iPad Pro features 6GB of RAM and a USB-C port. The M1 iPad Pro also features up to 2x faster storage and up to 40% faster GPU performance compared to the previous model. The fifth-generation iPad Air is also equipped with the M1 chip, but the iPad mini, entry-level iPad, and older iPad Pro models are not.

Introduced as part of iPadOS 16, Stage Manager allows users to resize iPad apps into overlapping windows for an improved multitasking experience. The feature fully supports an external display with up to 6K resolution, allowing users to work with up to four apps on the iPad and up to four apps on the external display simultaneously. A version of Stage Manager is also available on macOS Ventura for keeping windows front and center.

Article Link: Apple Tested Stage Manager on iPads Without M1 Chip and Wasn't Satisfied

At least add external display support.

 

[babyexercise]

So they may mean they had done some profit prediction, and then find out their profit would be historical high if they force more people to buy M1 M2 lol xd

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I think they weren't satisfied no one would be upgrading

Based on last year’s numbers, roughly 20 million folks that have NEVER purchased an iPad previously will be purchasing one this year. Of the 400 million folks that own iPads, only 5% need to be in the market for a new iPad to make up the other 20 million. If they’re concerned about anything, it’s whether or not they can make enough.

 

[ratspg]

I’m sure stage manager will be copied to Linux shortly and run on tons of computers and tablets. But of course you need an M1 for it. 😂😂🙃 Reality distortion field in full effect. And I’m an Apple user my entire life and still will be. But I’m not blind.

 

[babyexercise]

Do iphone 11 pro max users complain they don't get 12 Mini front camera deep fusion and night mode? Lol xd