Apple just obsoleted it with new software features. At 2 years old.
No longer can apple claim the high ground over software support vs Android.
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Apple Tested Stage Manager on iPads Without M1 Chip and Wasn't Satisfied
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No longer can apple claim the high ground over software support vs Android.
Because so many people are upset.
Why are so many people upset? Because multi-tasking on the iPad has been a **** show for decades now, and everyone with an iPad more capable than a Windows 95 era Pentium Pro is upset that Apple's "innovative" task manager is hobbled to M1 devices.
And they get even more upset when they learn it's a recycled idea from 2006 called Shrinkydink, and worked on Macs with 2gb of RAM.
Ipad pro 2020 was still in Apple store until M1 version came out on 21 May 2021, so a lot of "victims" bought pro 2020 in year 2021 then no more "real pro" updates in year 2022.
Except that Shrinkydink was being run on macs with 2gb of RAM in 2006.
Shrinkydink being the codename of the precursor to display manager.
Reality check: new features on a new version of an OS not coming to older devices (even the one prior to the current one) isn’t a new thing. There is precedent, so expectations should be kept in check. It is unreasonable to feel entitled to features that weren’t announced with the device, though entirely reasonable to want them. It’s great when they do come, but never a guarantee. Especially unreasonable to expect them on a 4yo device, and to read that much into the “Pro” moniker Apple uses for more powerful and feature rich product lines (i.e. it has nothing to do with “professional” applications or with a promise of greater/longer future software support)
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Doubtful, considering the amount of PR damage control they've been doing with all these recent interviews justifying the M1 requirement.
It has nothing to do with MacOS vs iPadOS. Swap memory requires an SSD controller which is not present on the A12 chips, and Stage Manager needs swap memory because it isn't just an app-switcher/window-manager.
You could still buy pro 2020 in April 2021, just around exactly a year ago, not 4 years ago.
Thanks, Apple Employee, but we already knew how you all felt.
Because the M chips have it and the A chips don't.
How do you know the A chips do have it?
It seems clear to me that they had a standard they wanted to reach, namely instantaneous switching without reloading (a la macOS). The A12Z and below were probably incapable of delivering that sort of performance. Namely, secondary storage access probably wasn’t fast enough to prevent a noticeable delay as the app reloaded (similar to the one where the app reloads when you switch to it in the existing task switcher, but possibly not as slow since the app’s not starting from scratch). Since it’s about memory access speed and not GUI things like shadows and transparency, no manner of visual changes would allow for quicker access to secondary storage.
They could potentially reduce the number of available apps, but by how much? And would it really be Stage Manager? Stage Manager lets you have four apps in one group and four more active apps. To reduce the number of apps, you’d have to change Stage Manager to have fewer apps in the background or fewer apps on screen. At some point, it would be virtually identical to what those iPads already have (two split screen apps with a slide over app).
As for how it works with M1 iPad Air models with lower secondary storage? It’s pretty likely that 16GB is an upper limit to how much storage an app can request without hitting the out of memory kill switch. On a lower capacity iPad Air, it likely will hit that limit below 16GB but perhaps above 3 or 4GB.
There’s likely no manner of “tweaks” that could address the memory bandwidth issue, and Apple likely felt that the reload would be distracting (and, if secondary storage access wasn’t fast enough, even with virtual memory swap, the delay might have been no faster than launching the app from scratch). It’s a very strong technical argument from Apple, and the naysayers on MacRumors haven’t come up with anywhere near as strong of an argument as it. The closest they’ve come is that the A12Z was used in the DTK, but this argument isn’t particularly strong, since the DTK units were all probably manufactured in a single production run and reflect a device configuration that never appeared in a shipping iPad. There’s not strong evidence that the A12Z in the DTK is the same A12Z that appeared in the 2020 iPad Pro or that there weren’t supporting chips to make memory access faster (or that they didn’t just use faster access memory). Additionally, Apple may have felt that the secondary storage access speed on the DTK was good enough for a developer-centric leased pre-release Macintosh model (remember, the Mac used to use hard drives for swap memory and did so at a time after the iPad was introduced), but that doesn’t mean it would be good enough on a production version of consumer centric hardware (especially under the iPad name). The A12Z appearing in the DTK doesn’t make the argument that the A12Z could handle Stage Manager a slam dunk case.
The person I was replying to said that maybe my expectations were out of whack if I thought it was unreasonable to expect a 1 to 4 yo “pro” device to be able to run this feature (paraphrasing). That’s where that came from.
Wanting and hoping for them on a 1yo device is fair, doesn’t mean you are entitled to them. On a 4yo device, that’s just a pipe dream.
As an aside, the naysayers have had to resort to arguments about Apple needing to drum up more sales or about planned obsolescence since the technical argument isn’t terribly strong. The problem with such arguments is that they assume malicious intent and conspiratorial reasoning (which feed off each other). There also appears to be a strong emotional argument going on (which again drives and is driven by the act of assuming malicious intent and by conspiratorial reasoning). It’s generally not good to give your thinking over to such things, in particular, assuming malicious intent as a default position tends to drive feelings of persecution and toxic group identity. It tends to lead to a more depressed outlook on life in general the more you engage in it. But a large amount of society (including the media elite) deliberately try to sell people on accepting such an outlook. If we’re going to be more unified as a society, we need to assume positive intent about other people and (if not all, then at least the vast majority of) institutions. Do people and institutions sometimes come up short of our expectations? Of course, all the time. But to assume that’s due to malicious intent causes people to lose trust in other people (especially the people “not like themselves” [ie members of perceived outgroups]) and in the (human-run and thus imperfect) institutions that largely tie society together. Short of strong evidence of conspiracy, it’s best to assume positive intent. Even in the case of obvious conspiracies, it’s best to assume guarded positive intent about the individuals. (For instance, gangs and organized crime are obviously engaged in conspiracies to commit crime. To assume guarded positive intent about individuals is to assume that the person can determine they want to leave that lifestyle or that they entered that lifestyle out of fear or other motivating factors, not necessarily out of a desire to explicitly hurt or even kill other people, even if that’s the obvious rational conclusion to the idea of joining a criminal gang.)
(Separate post because I wanted this paragraph to stand on its own as a larger commentary instead of being caught up in the technical argument above. That way people who like one or the other but not both can react to the bits that resonate with them.)
It is in the ssd controller, you can use swap in Linux too with any reasonable speed cpu, it is nothing new as long as you have ssd. You don't even know what you are talking about.
This may come as a shock, but the A12X doesn't work by itself. It requires ram and a storage. The M1 iPad has a lot more ram and faster storage, so did the A12X Mac mini.
Wait, so you think that every SSD controller is identical and there is no difference between the M1 SoC, and A12 CPU and SSD, and the CPU and SSD on that Linux computer?
Be my guest, I mean people coming to a discussion forum about Apple products to talk about features of Apple products. The audacity!
Anyway, there will always be those who criticise everything and there will always be those who defend everything Apple does. If Apple changes direction, so does everyone else.
I can understand that people are angry if Apple finally supports one of the features everyone had been hoping for, especially those spending north of a grand on a product, only to see it restricted to the newest devices.
I'll have to take the word of those with more technical understanding that Apple's arguments actually make sense, but my main takeaway then is that the iPad, unlike the Mac, has absolutely no room to grow into anything or adapt going forward. It also means that Apple's fancy marketing language of how powerful the device is falls apart quite quickly.
It all comes down to the fact that people have wanted the iPad to behave more like a Mac, they have what they believe are incredibly powerful devices and now they're being told these devices cannot handle multiple windows on a screen.
Whether or not this is technically sound, it's a message that is difficult to convey to people who have worked in multiple windows all their computing lives on far less powerful devices. Enter outrage stage left.
Theater kids who ended up as the Stage Manager on their high school’s production of Into The Woods, rejoice
I don't know where people get this kind of audacity. They were never promised this feature, or any feature. They bought the device as is, and knew they would get some software updates in the future. And they do. Any sort of outrage or fauxrage here is wildly inappropriate.
They aren't really that technical. The feature doesn't work well on iPads without a lot of memory and fast storage for swap (for even more memory). The feature is a memory hog. Maybe its poorly coded, or maybe its Apple just pushing the hardware like game developers do. Either way, that's what it is. Its not up for debate or interpretation.
This is correct, and more people need to understand it. It has always been the case. The tablet form factor does not have the unlimited potential people have projected onto it for years.
I've used iPads since day 1 and I've never has this false impression that they are incredibly powerful. Try doing anything on it that a Mac can do, and the Mac will do it better and faster, while doing 20 other things.
Not sure how or why Apple's iPad marketing gets taken so literally. They want to sell iPads to people who don't actually need computers in the first place, but have used them in the past because it was the only option.
Generally speaking, regardless of what features Apple adds, what marketing says, what people on blogs claim....iPad is used for watching video. Has been since day one. Apple even indicated that iPad Pro segmented by 12.9 and 11 models aren't even the same market. 11" buyers aren't even attempting to use Pro features, and are just buying the best iPad they can afford, and then watching videos and playing games with it.