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

[mrmister]

Clearly the answer is "we could have done it...so we ALSO made it have a version with an external screen, so that then THEN it needs an M1"

I believe it needs an M1 to run without compromise hooked up to a 6k monitor.

I also believe many could do it if it ran so that only mirroring, but not expanding, was supported.

This is a great way to give M1 adoptees something only they can do, and encourage people to buy new ipads.

If they had wanted a version that ran on other chips, they could absolutely have done it, even if it didn't span screens.

 

[Wildkraut]

It took awhile but apple is almost exactly where they where when Steve Jobs came back 25 years ago. Way too many overlapping products and sku's.

Tim Crook is long term f’ing up Apple for short term profits, this will work out for Tim & Co. wallets, but not for Apple. The Steve Jobs notes has been fully utilized already and nothing more is left to take fruits from. Now they have recycle till dead end, and will come up with more crap like Homepod, and VR/AR glasses nobody wants.

 

[hans1972]

I think it’s Apple that doesn’t understand what it wants iPad to be. They keep pushing it as a full blown computer but the product feels more like a companion device because of deficiencies in software, yet the thing costs more than most entry-level computers.

Well, Apple doesn't want the iPad to work like Windows PC or Macs or Chromebooks.
Which means support for end user accessible file systems and multi-window application management should be very poor.

 

[bradman83]

The a12z also came out the same time as the a14… but it was just a modified a12 that was already 2 years old… the a12z should have never been released.

The A12Z came out six months before the A14, which in technology years is an eternity. The M1 is the logical successor to the A12Z as it’s essentially a rebranded A14X but Apple couldn’t hold off updating the iPad Pro until the M1 was ready as it would have been a 2.5 year lifespan for the 2018 pro.

 

[44267547]

And yet I’m able to do all my work on my iPad Pro, no computer necessary. It’s a good thing there are options for all of us

Yup.

Unfortunately, no matter what you say, (even though it’s accurate), people will tell you why that you can’t do what you need to accomplish on an iPad, because it doesn’t align with their narrative or they’re just completely bitter over Apple, that makes them feel better when they can whine/rant on the Internet.

 

[NT1440]

Why is this being dragged on? It sounds fishy.

"The power of the M1 chip ensures that all apps being used in Stage Manager are "instantaneously responsive."

How about instead of running multiple apps. Can you let us run a few apps using "Stage Manager" on my iPad Pro which does not have the M1 Chip? Instead of four apps… let me run two apps, please. I know it’s doable and the iPad without the M1 Chip can handle it.

Why should users have to even think about it in those terms?

Apple has set their bar on performance and functionality at this baseline. Every M series going forward will do *at least* this.

Could they have delivered a different experience for other devices? Absolutely. Do they want to? Apparently not, so this is what it is.

 

[azentropy]

…and Just like that we go from having (or so we thought) years of iPad hardware that was overkill for what limited things iPadOS could do to now being underpowered.

 

[quietstormSD]

I got an iPad Air with M1. I'm glad I did. I feel like with this you may not even need a real "computer" anymore.

 

[CraigJDuffy]

I love how they keep going on about this as if jailbreakers haven’t had freely resizable windows on iPad for years.

 

[CraigJDuffy]

I got an iPad Air with M1. I'm glad I did. I feel like with this you may not even need a real "computer" anymore.

Let’s see you edit a Final Cut project on the iPad. You can’t because even apple doesn’t believe their pro hype 😂

 

[Digitalguy]

People who interpret ”what’s a computer” as Apple saying the iPad will replace your computer are allowing their own biases to infer more than is being said.
As far as unhappy comments,
1) Most consumers are not posting in forums, but of those who do, most do so to complain.
2) I see the same names posting over and over across many threads.

I see an even smaller number of names here and on youtube defending Apple like faithful lawyers over and over 😉

 

[CraigJDuffy]

Because every other multitasking solution is capable of slowing down the system.

I think Apple wants a solution where the user can't slow down the system even if they wanted to.

You say this a lot, iPads hang up in the same way macs do.

 

[purfledspruce]

Right, Apple. You designed it that way. To provide your loyal customers another chance to give you $1000 for a tablet, so that they can have the same features that Microsoft provided on the Surface tablet 7 ****ing years ago.

 

[theotherphil]

I hate to say it but Samsung does it with Dex and significantly weaker chips!

Which Samsung tablets do it with 6Gb or less RAM?

It’s not the power of the processor that is the concern, it’s the amount of available RAM to keep the programs open and speed of the SSD required for swap to provide a smooth experience.

The A12Z processor absolutely has the power to perform the window management. It doesn’t have the RAM, memory bandwidth or SSD speeds required in the 2020 iPP. We saw that with the Mac Mini dev transition kit where it came with 16Gb ram vs 6Gb.

The M1 has 64GB/s memory bandwidth vs 42GB/s of the A12Z. The interesting thing here is that a single performance core on the M1 is able to fully saturate this and is unheard of in other designs. This is likely why M1 also has 12Mb L3 cache vs 8Mb on the A12Z.

As for SSD speeds:

A12Z Sequential Read: 585MB/s
M1 Sequential Read: 2370Mb/s (4x faster)

A12Z Sequential Write: 368Mb/s
M1 Sequential Write: 2064Mb/s (5.6x faster)

A12Z Random 4k Read: 19Mb/s
M1 Random 4k Read: 21.43Mb/s (negligible difference)

A12Z Random 4k write: 3.93Mb/s
M1 Random 4k Write: 23.31Mb/s (5.9x faster)

Testing with Jazz Disk Bench as it’s the only test I’ve found that shows random 4k read/ writes. From those results, the SSD speed of the 2020 iPP cannot support fast swap files.

Apple will not ship a feature where there’s a poor experience, so can we all now move on from this?

 

[fbr$]

Apple could have done a temporary inferior custom Stage Manager for older devices, but Apple would have hated making a worse version...

Every year Apple does exactly that, when they release a new iOS version that supports old hardware, like the iPhone 8 with only 2GB of RAM that is supported by iOS 16.

 

[teh_hunterer]

"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?

Haha that is precisely it. This is Apple, remember.

The true issue isn't that Apple is restricting stage manager to iPads with fast storage and 8GB+ RAM, it's that they shipped the recent 2018-2020 iPad Pros with low RAM and such crappy storage in the first place. I always felt the lack of RAM in these devices meant they wouldn't hack it once more pro features and apps came out, which is a real shame because the chips in these SoCs were more powerful than most of the Macs being released at the time. They had to know this situation would come up in the future.

 

[hcherry]

Apple is not going to make people happy here either way. If they enabled Stage Manager for non M1 iPads people would either complain that it runs poorly or that they can’t open as many apps.

And then comes the class action claiming apple was intentionally causing machines to perform poorly.

Can’t win.

 

[subjonas]

I see an even smaller number of names here and on youtube defending Apple like faithful lawyers over and over 😉

Yup agreed.

 

[Flabasha]

Will you be sending a message to Apple by voting with your wallet and purchase Samsung devices going forward?

I did. I have 2 12.9” iPad Pros (2017, 2018). It was time to upgrade… and I bought a Samsung Tab Ultra 15” with OLED display. It’s GLORIOUS. I had NO idea how (intentionally) bad iPadOS was until I used an Android tablet.

Now, to be fair, my M1 MacBook Pro is by far the best laptop I’ve ever owned. But the iPad Pro feels like a zombie product.

 

[chrono1081]

My biggest issue as it's always been is let the non-M1 Macs (including M1 mini) have it confined to the device with no external display. That is absolutely 100% doable with the specs on the iPad. If Apple enabled that I'd be happy. I get no external display support, I really do, but the draw for me is decent multitasking on the iPad itself. The views are already there when you swipe up, just in a grid format.

 

[HaddockW]

I've been running Stage Manager on my 11" M1 and it is resource intensive. You can play a youtube on main screen, connected to a 5K display, have LumaFusion, Files App open up. Two videos playing on two different displays. Then you can start feel the chugging. And start loading up multiple pages, MS Teams, Slack, and Zoom. The machine bogs. So I am iffy already on 8GB. Might have to upgrade to M2 16GB. It really is that good. You can fill up the screen 90% (hiding the left pane) and swap between apps. Big upgrade over side-by-side.

 

[CraigJDuffy]

Which Samsung tablets do it with 6Gb or less RAM?

It’s not the power of the processor that is the concern, it’s the amount of available RAM to keep the programs open and speed of the SSD required for swap to provide a smooth experience.

The A12Z processor absolutely has the power to perform the window management. It doesn’t have the RAM, memory bandwidth or SSD speeds required in the 2020 iPP. We saw that with the Mac Mini dev transition kit where it came with 16Gb ram vs 6Gb.

The M1 has 64GB/s memory bandwidth vs 42GB/s of the A12Z. The interesting thing here is that a single performance core on the M1 is able to fully saturate this and is unheard of in other designs. This is likely why M1 also has 12Mb L3 cache vs 8Mb on the A12Z.

As for SSD speeds:

A12Z Sequential Read: 585MB/s
M1 Sequential Read: 2370Mb/s (4x faster)

A12Z Sequential Write: 368Mb/s
M1 Sequential Write: 2064Mb/s (5.6x faster)

A12Z Random 4k Read: 19Mb/s
M1 Random 4k Read: 21.43Mb/s (negligible difference)

A12Z Random 4k write: 3.93Mb/s
M1 Random 4k Write: 23.31Mb/s (5.9x faster)

Testing with Jazz Disk Bench as it’s the only test I’ve found that shows random 4k read/ writes. From those results, the SSD speed of the 2020 iPP cannot support fast swap files.

Apple will not ship a feature where there’s a poor experience, so can we all now move on from this?

Hate to break it to you but macs had serviceable swap files on far slower storage.

 

[adamlbiscuit]

I bought my iPad Pro (2020) because it and the Apple Pencil offer a digital art experience that is, in my opinion, unrivalled. Stage Manager not being present in no way inhibits or invalidates my use case upon purchasing it.

If you buy an iPad based on what you hope it might be able to do after a couple of future software updates, and not for what it can do at the point you purchase it, you're always going to run the risk of being disappointed.

I'm part of the A12Z gang and I don't regret my purchase one bit, because it still does exactly what I wanted it to do back when I bought it. I bought it because I wanted an iPad specifically (not a traditional computer) and because I wanted to use it with Apple Pencil to draw on. I didn't buy it because I hoped it would eventually gain macOS-like multi-tasking capabilities and suddenly become more a traditional desktop-like computer. I already have a traditional computer for that.

 

[blackcrayon]

Because every other multitasking solution is capable of slowing down the system.

I think Apple wants a solution where the user can't slow down the system even if they wanted to.

Thank you.

I can easily all but lock up a 16 GB RAM M1 Mac with enough tabs and apps. Apple doesn't want this experience on iOS, and it's been that way since iPhone OS 1.

 

[CraigJDuffy]

Very bad news for Craig - although with less drop shadows.


“The Retina iPad mini I used to test the tweak doesn’t stutter or seem to miss a beat with four apps on the screen” that’s the first gen retina iPad mini.


To believe that a modern iPad couldn’t handle 8 apps is nonsense.