Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
They likely could have put Stage Manager on the 2020 iPad Pro and just excluded external display support. There's nothing stopping my iPad from being able to resize some windows and put some shadows on. Did they even try, or did they just go straight for the M1 iPads because they have the hardware features they thought would be helpful, and built Stage Manager solely to those requirements?
 
I hate to say it but Samsung does it with Dex and significantly weaker chips!
Dex is way better. Stage manager reduces more screen real estate than just having the letterbox from what I can tell. People asked for full screen external display OR some type of Dex hybrid system and they gave us yet another and more complicated way to use windows in the form of stage manager. Takes a huge brain to remember all the gestures and shortcuts on an iPad these days.
 
How do you know it's doable? Do you have documentation to back this up or merely speculating?
Heck, even on a lowish iPad 2 no-frills windowed multitasking worked (assuming you kept track of the RAM usage and didn't start memory-heavy apps in parallel) with Quasar. Window resizing, relocation etc. worked as quickly as on MacOS. Why couldn't significantly more powerful hardware do the same (or better)?!
 
In all their statements there is a key element missing. The iPad Air 5th generation with 64gb of ram. It can’t swap memory, but it can handle 8 tabs without any issues.
So they could say that swapping is not indispensable, it’s a pro just when you open high intensive app with stage manager.
 
The funny thing here really is that this fancy implementation of multitasking is probably not what users have been shouting for. Many will not care to have it.

But by defending it to only work for M1, Craig and Co basically state (aka admit) that the other iPads never really were in the same ball park as PCs, even though that was the message for many years before M1.

And it has been such an obvious lie. And they don’t need it. They would still make tons of money without this stupidly low base memory and the artificial split between Mac and iPadOS just to sell double the number of devices and keep people buying new ones every few years.
 
Meh

That 3D looking Stage Manager

It looks like it is supposed to be for some kind of VR/AR headset operating system.

Maybe it works there.

But on desktop macOS it stinks and is very buggy and awkward in Beta 1.

1655151112234.jpeg
 
  • Like
Reactions: Saladin12
Following the WWDC keynote last week, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi spoke with TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino about the new Stage Manager feature for iPad and Mac. Notably, he elaborated on Stage Manager being limited to M1 iPads.
Interesting Apple has had to reinforce their argument so that means they are feeling some heat. So iPadOS 16 once again for non-M1 owners is lacking.
 
Last edited:
I understand the blacklash here, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m also not surprised. We’ve seen this before where software functionality is tied to a specific hardware generation.

I’m not mad, I’m just not surprised.
 
  • Sad
Reactions: sorgo †
I hate to say it but Samsung does it with Dex and significantly weaker chips!

Fast forward after lot of negative feedback in 2023.

“in iPadOS 17 we are introducing a new feature and we are calling it ‘back to the future’. Back to the future enables recent non-M1 iPad’s to make use of the same great user experiences many M1-iPad users love and enjoy that we introduced in iPadOS 16 like; Stage Manager. This was only possible by the amazing teamwork between our experts from the hardware- and software departments working on the best OS in the world only Apple can deliver.”

“(virtual)-crowd cheers”
 
Its utter BS and selfish to use this tactic to force people to upgrade from a nearly new iPad at a time when the entire world is struggling financially.

If the A12Z is capable of running full Mac OS on the dev Mac minis 2 years ago, the latest iPad mini can run this feature.
 
Will you be sending a message to Apple by voting with your wallet and purchase Samsung devices going forward?
You don’t have to buy either device. iPads are still rated at the same battery life for like the last 10yrs and what new hardware could they possibly announce that would get people to buy these things? I sold my Mini 6 because the display was terrible and I would rather use my 13PM that has two days worth of battery life and is more useful in general. I sold my 12.9” IPP because watching any media on it felt so cramped with the letterboxes it was a crap experience and now that the MBP has the same display as the current 12.9” but much more battery life I find myself wondering what the purpose of an iPad is unless you use the Pencil.
There’s better hardware and value elsewhere in the Apple ecosystem that the iPad is like a 3rd device if not 4th as it blurs too many lines. Jack of all trades, master of none. iPads would have to do something much better than an iPhone or MacBook and they don’t, drawing excluded.
 
Personally, the more I think about it, the less I like the idea of not utilizing a big chunk of my screen real estate just to switch between apps. Most people I know don’t swap between groups of apps, either, which stage manager seems to have been optimized for… like virtual desktops.

So you’re saying that iPads are better suited for full screen apps to take advantage of as much screen real estate as possible, without wasting it in overlapping windows, multitasking UI and window chrome?

Yeah, that’s what iPad was designed for from the very beginning and what everyone who doesn’t see the need for a Mac experience on an iPad has been saying all along.
 
AD6D7C04-F6A4-4291-AC50-165BB2B27F01.jpeg

This is what it looked back in 2012 on how much ram … ? in case anyone was wondering.

And a review from back in the day

It’s obvious that Apple’s hardware has gotten powerful enough to make this level of multitasking possible. On the iPad Air, I noticed zero lag or glitches while using multiple apps at once […] which speaks to the performance capabilities of the A7 chip.
 
Last edited:
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.