Apple's Craig Federighi Further Explains Why Stage Manager is Only for M1 iPads

[BellSystem]

I’m glad that small time yOuTuBe cReAToR Rene Ritchie was able to get the scoop. Definitely NOT Apple employee 15655. I’m sure his studio isn’t hidden in one of the Bandley buildings somewhere and his paycheck DOESNT have an Apple logo on it. Can’t wait until they are done using that guy as a mouthpiece. Him and iJustine….mostly him.

 

[MajorFubar]

I’m glad that small time yOuTuBe cReAToR Rene Ritchie was able to get the scoop. Definitely NOT Apple employee 15655. I’m sure his studio isn’t hidden in one of the Bandley buildings somewhere and his paycheck DOESNT have an Apple logo on it. Can’t wait until they are done using that guy as a mouthpiece. Him and iJustine….mostly him.

Nah...he's WAAAAAY less annoying than iJustine, even if they really are both Apple insiders (I'm not so sure he actually is). On the other hand I'd happily pin a picture of her to dartboard.

 

[rubaxter]

"We really designed Stage Manager to take full advantage [of the M1 chip]," said Federighi. "If you look at the way the apps tilt and shadow and how they animate in and out. To do that at super high frame rates, across very large displays and multiple displays, requires the peak of graphics performance that no one else can deliver."

So decorative window dressings like shadows and ephemeral animations were deemed so essential to the functionality of Stage Manager that it was worth excluding several years of recent powerful products from its use? Those and external display support couldn't have been designed as runtime-optional depending on the processing speed and memory capacity of each running unit?

We all love you Craig but this is just ridiculous.

All that time and effort spent on Windows, yet no way to easily control them, like the Mouse-and-Window paradigm Jobs STOLE from XEROX?

Let's face it, it is just pure $$$$ in all these cases, with these no-keyboard laptop screens.

Give us a 2-in-1 MacBook Air!

 

[rubaxter]

...too bad we can't find out whether it's indeed poor because we aren't given the chance by Apple.

Given the excellent hardware of even earlier-gen iPad Pros, I assume it woulnd't run THAT bad...

Couldn't be much worse than the existing system.

Of course, there's still that lack of mouse/touchpad control in ALL these 'Whistling Past the Graveyard' attempts to avoid the death match between a REAL laptop replacement and the MacBook line.

 

[Jimmy_Banks]

So? Is Apple changing the system requirements for stage manager? Nope (for now).

So you lied in your claim and are now moving goal posts. In other words you discuss in bad faith and aren't worth replying to any further.

 

[BootsWalking]

The big chunk of the computational load is ensuring that apps are can be switched on at lightning-fast speed. However, the animations are also important to the feature looking (feeling) intuitively correct.

That has been accomplished on computers with GUIs going on several decades now, across many different operating systems. Why should that be different for iPad?

You'd like to have iPads working fine standalone but losing capabilities when connected to an external monitor? That makes the iPad a complicated system to explain to users. It also makes "function robbing" external monitors much harder to sell. This suggestion of "runtime optional" is the actual thing that sounds just ridiculous.

Complicated how? How is it different than users connecting an optional external monitor to a laptop or computer?

 

[Zachari]

this has the same energy as when Craig explained to MKBHD why they didn’t have a calculator and weather app on the iPad.

Surprised the weather app isn’t M1 only feature too.

 

[honglong1976]

Most of the people won’t use 8 apps at one, because most of the people don’t connect the iPad to a secondary display.

Why not at least support Stage Manager with 4 apps on non-M1 iPad Pros with only mirroring supported on an external display with those iPads?

Because you wouldn't need to upgrade to an iPad with an M1. That's the reason.

Apple kulled so many devices. People aren't upgrading frequently enough and Apple want you to upgrade all the time (££££$$$$).

 

[jonnysods]

I'm pretty sure my A12X could handle this. The thing is still blazing fast and capable. I don't care if I get the feature or not, but the processor is no slouch, even after all this time.

 

[nortonandreev]

I’m pretty sure this doesn’t correspond with the truth. Regardless, I’m happy it’s a M1-exclusive feature cuz there must be something that differentiates the M-chip iPads, otherwise they’re not justified.

 

[Username-already-in-use]

What a croc! As Max Tech (on YouTube) pointed out, the 2020 iPad Pros contain the A12Z chip, which is what was in the Mac mini developer kits supplied to Devs in preparation for Apple silicon, and those dev units ran full Mac OS. Yet now we're being told that the A12Z cannot handle Stage Manager.

Typical Apple being Apple and screwing over their customers in order to extract more profit, and all while they endlessly virtue signal about this and that. I won't be upgrading my 2020 iPad Pro any time soon.

Those dev kits had 16GB RAM (not 4-6GB) and ran MacOS (not iPadOS) - and ran it pretty sluggishly from what I understand.

 

[wanha]

There sure seem to be a LOT of technical experts in these forums lol

Also lots of mindreaders here that claim to know Apple's true motivations

 

[Aleh]

Macs from a decade ago literally run a less restricted version of windowed apps please stop lying through your teeth Apple

 

[blackcrayon]

For the first time i'm really considering going back to Windows. Federighis explanations regarding #StageManager seem aggressive and hypocritical to me to be ignored. So Federighi is telling us that a Samsung Note 9 can do things an iPad Pro from 2020 cant do by any possible software design? I am deeply disappointed by this stupid or ice cold mismangement. A glimpse of the future FormApple users?

Note 9 has more RAM, and mostly phone apps. All you have to do is look at the "top" apps for the iPad Pro and the 'top android tablet apps'. And imagine opening 4 Pro level apps on a tablet with 4 GB of RAM and watch the OS force quit them or grind to a halt swapping to disk.

Those dev kits had 16GB RAM (not 4-6GB) and ran MacOS (not iPadOS) - and ran it pretty sluggishly from what understand.

Reason doesn't work on these folks. Yes a Mac SE running System 6 with MultiFinder had multiple windows, so why doesn't a 4 year old iPad?!

 

[blackcrayon]

Because you wouldn't need to upgrade to an iPad with an M1. That's the reason.

Apple kulled so many devices. People aren't upgrading frequently enough and Apple want you to upgrade all the time (££££$$$$).

You're so right. Craig is going to fire the engineers that made iOS 16 work at all on pre M1 iPads. People aren't upgrading frequently enough

 

[maccymac42]

All that time and effort spent on Windows, yet no way to easily control them, like the Mouse-and-Window paradigm Jobs STOLE from XEROX?

Let's face it, it is just pure $$$$ in all these cases, with these no-keyboard laptop screens.

Give us a 2-in-1 MacBook Air!

Nailed it. $$$$ is why this was done.

 

[brofkand]

This is what you get when Marketing takes the lead in a Tech company. Eventually the $$$ will win.

Steve probarbly would have said: you either make it work or find yourself a new job.

Just like he did with iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G right?

 

[HackMacDaddy]

PCalc is available for $10.

Sorry but I'm too cheap to buy a calc app for 10 bucks when I'm used to it being included in computers and similar devices since the 1980s.

 

[AndiG]

From a developers point of view, I can understand Craig. I didn‘t listen to his explanations, but here is what I tell you from my point of view.
iOS and all its pendants do not implement a windowing system. Instead they just draw to a framebuffer. To avoid flickering the apps are likely to use double buffering. So an app needs 4 bytes/pixel *2 to store a rgba value or more than this if you want to support 10bits/pixel.

So how do you transform this system to a multi windowing one? The easiest way is to give every app its own framebuffer and then combine those framebuffers into a main buffer. Lots of buffers need lots of memory.

Same is true for the apps. Using iOS, an app „dies“ when you switch to another app. The memory of those old app can be recycled, the processing power is freed - rest is lots of gimmicks, nice animations and stuff.
Do you remember the fact the Android devices usually have more memory installed?
Yep, thats it. iOS is superior to Android when it comes to resource handling. But when you need all the resources at once, there is nothing to handle.

Personally, I like my iPad to be a single screen/windows device. The new iPadOS and the new M1 iPads compete with macbooks - this is a completely different story.

 

[theotherphil]

Again, if the performance is the issue, then explain how the Intel MacBook air can do it.

If there's an actual hardware required for stage manager, eg a controller that is not available on previous gen ipads, why can't just they say so? Why made up all of this as if performance is the issue? The previous gen ipad already have desktop class components, including nvme storage. How's that not enough performance, while the Intel MacBook air is fine?

If performance of the M1 is required, then Apple wouldn't have enabled it on the much inferior Intel Mac. But they did.

They already explained that it was the amount of RAM and speed of the SSD’s that are the issue, not the performance of the SOC.

I even included benchmarks in my earlier post showing the M1 iPP SSD is nearly 6X faster than that in the 2020 iPP.

But, everybody skips over that and complains about how powerful the A12Z is….when it has been explained by Apple and other users that it is the amount of RAM and speed of the SSD’s that’s the problem.

 

[phrehdd]

There sure seem to be a LOT of technical experts in these forums lol

Also lots of mindreaders here that claim to know Apple's true motivations

Apple has in the past strategically released certain features and withheld others. Early days of Intel, we say 386 and 486 "sx" CPUs that were in fact fully built normal CPUs that were crippled. This created market tiers. Nothing new about this and nothing new about Apple not being exactly honest. As I have mentioned, older OS with far far less CPU and a fraction of the RAM was able to do something akin to this. I can see why Apple might want to push this feature with M chips and reap multiple benefits including profits.

 

[Digital Dude]

Hello MacGyver,
Clever troubleshooting technique! 👍

 

[wanha]

Apple has in the past strategically released certain features and withheld others. Early days of Intel, we say 386 and 486 "sx" CPUs that were in fact fully built normal CPUs that were crippled. This created market tiers. Nothing new about this and nothing new about Apple not being exactly honest. As I have mentioned, older OS with far far less CPU and a fraction of the RAM was able to do something akin to this. I can see why Apple might want to push this feature with M chips and reap multiple benefits including profits.

That's exactly my point - "you can see why" but you can't know why for sure.

Always be careful when believing you know what someone else's true motivations are, because all you have is a narrative that fits your few data points, but there's no proof whether you are right.

Believing you are right will lead you down a path of thinking and if you happen to be wrong, everything you see from that path will be distorted.

 

[purfledspruce]

There's a saying in software engineering where software will always use up whatever resources hardware upgrades will give you. Hardware from 30 years ago can't run any software from today no matter how simple, so saying this is pretty meaningless. As a software engineer who cut his teeth on Windows 3.1 and ProDos, things are not even remotely comparable.

I wish people who knew nothing about how software is written would stop saying stuff like this because it's nonsense. There are so many variables that are different between today and 30 years ago. The resources required to just open an empty app are so much more vast than apps from back then. People do not realize what goes on in a modern OS just to open the simplest application compared to what OS'es handled back then.

So, as a software engineer, are you saying that you couldn’t design the system to fit the specs?

Seems like a choice Apple made to fit certain specs. And their customer base, who bought iPads that in some cases rival MacBook pro prices, are pissed.

Everyone who’s upset has their viewpoints, and those viewpoints are valid, no matter how much experience they have programming. It’s a valid point that the competitor’s tablets have had more ram (they needed it) and therefore similar capabilities for years. It’s a valid point that Apple’s main chips are likely capable of stage manager, perhaps with less animation/fewer apps/slower, even if they don’t have the ram or other system hardware that’s capable of it. And, as customers that dumped a boatload of money on their iPad Pros, they are right to feel betrayed by this move, even if Apple couldn’t do anything *today* to make it work.

Too many times of screwing over your customers (even if the “screwing over” is in the customers’ minds) and the customers will make different choices.

I’ll probably keep buying Apple. But I’m certainly not going to buy another iPad Pro setup with an 12.9” iPad ($1100,) pen ($130,) and keyboard ($350, total $1,580.) I’d rather spend that money on a full laptop and save some money. The M2 Air will be $1,200, has double the storage, and should be fully supported for a minimum of 5 years and will probably function pretty well for a minimum of 7.

Will this hurt Apple? No. They won’t care, and they’ll keep making a boatload of money. So whatever. But they screwed over people who bought really expensive kit from them. So in my opinion, they deserve the ********* they’ve gotten here.

 

[ian87w]

this has the same energy as when Craig explained to MKBHD why they didn’t have a calculator and weather app on the iPad.

Surprised the weather app isn’t M1 only feature too.

Can't wait for M2-only calculator app, because it needs the faster neural engine...