Thanks for your recommend against.
I'll jump from Air 5 64GB to 11" Pro 128GB just for those exclusive feature.
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iPadOS 16 Lets Apps Use Storage as Virtual RAM on M1 iPads
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I'll jump from Air 5 64GB to 11" Pro 128GB just for those exclusive feature.
Definitely, it’s literally the size of a 13” laptop which me personally use with both full screen, split screen and floating windows.
I totally welcome this for sure, hopefully we can mix and match because the stage manager blocks stacked to the left seems to be too big and takes a lot of the screen space?
Dave245
macrumors G4
I’ve seen a rumour/ leak (for what it’s worth) that says Apple will release a 14.1” iPad Pro at some point. It would make sense with these new features and give even more screen to use them, especially if at some point Apple intends to make Pro apps like Final Cut Pro, available on the iPad Pro.
I find quite the opposite, for the majority of users the iPad is all they need.
For home need all you really need is an iPad, for work, well it depends on the work you need it might not be enough, but still home and some job the iPad is a workhorse.
Why? You’ll get all features except virtual memory. But stage manager is fully compatible.
Very good feature. But extremely disappointed that only iPads with M1 is supported. A12Z should have been supported. It was just the previous model of the current Pro iPads.
rui no onna
Contributor
To be honest, I know a lot of folks who get by with just a smartphone for personal/home use and a work-supplied PC.
A lot of my co-workers had to buy new laptops after the pandemic hit and we started partial WFH.
Stage manager requires a minimum of 8gb of RAM. A12Z can’t handle it. Also, A12Z, so A12X is a 4 years old processor.
I don’t understand why using a swap file is some huge revolution in technology. It’s a super old idea, other OSes have done it for decades.
EugW
macrumors P6
It's not revolutionary for Windows, macOS, or Android, but it's a pretty big deal for iPadOS. It's a fundamental change in its design philosophy. And it's about time.
I should have specified I wouldn’t recommend an iPad Pro. I love the Air, and my mom uses only a regular iPad. Great devices. The Pro just isn’t worth the money to me (Unless you really need it for, say, the pencil) over a MacBook Air. Not yet.
Virtual memory and overlap windowing will be biggest thing for the near future, all the major apps will slowly updated to give iPad version the same functionality as their desktop counterpart.
I'm afraid 14.1" will be too heavy to be held for leisure reading or youtube watching.
1. This is not just program image swap; this is true virtual memory, apps can use more memory than physical RAM size. This is like transition from 8086 to 80486 in the PC history.
2. It needs dedicated H/W that is expensive in the sense of gate count and energy consumption.
And Qualcomm is now lagging behind even further.
I would say this the 2nd best feature we are hungry for; the most wanted is an embedded X86 i5 dual or quad core silicon.
Well the pro of course is aimed at people who need better performance / screen so I agree it is not for everyone, but people want the latest and greatest for bragging rights and then end up finding out it's not the device for them.
The Air M1 is a perfect machine for the majority of the iPad users out there today.
The preview notes have been updated for iPadOS 16 yet again. Earlier it stated that stage manager is coming to iPad Air 5 but memory swap only to iPad Air With 256GB memory.
After this Apple stated that stage manager uses the swap memory which is why it is m1 exclusive, and this made no sense as the 64GB air was the only M1 iPad that has stage manager but no memory swap as per the previous preview notes.
Now the updated notes have no mention of the memory swap at all! So maybe the will enable it for the 64gb M1 air5? To go with that swap is needed for stage manager narrative?
After this Apple stated that stage manager uses the swap memory which is why it is m1 exclusive, and this made no sense as the 64GB air was the only M1 iPad that has stage manager but no memory swap as per the previous preview notes.
Now the updated notes have no mention of the memory swap at all! So maybe the will enable it for the 64gb M1 air5? To go with that swap is needed for stage manager narrative?
Attachments
rui no onna
Contributor
You might be looking at a different page.
This one still mentions swap.
OS - iPadOS 27
iPadOS 27 with all-new Siri AI powered by Apple Intelligence and new features for a more responsive, delightful experience.
www.apple.com
Sorry to contradict you, but even the first iPhone CPU had a MMU, and could do virtual memory. All "application" ARM cores had it since the early 90s (Intel's since the 386 in 1984). It's pretty much a given since then, it's unimaginable to make a modern complex OS without it.
Swapping per se is done by the OS kernel. The first Raspberry Pi was based on the same ARM core, and Linux on it swapped memory all the time on those poor SD cards...
Maybe iOS didn't do it because of performance issues, battery consumption, storage wear, whatever, but not the CPU. I think it's none of those things, the choice was purely political.
It's just silly how Apple pushed the iPad as a "computer replacement", yet they intentionally left out such a basic feature.
EugW
macrumors P6
I think it was due to performance, battery consumption, and cost.
Because of Apple's optimizations, refusal to allow virtual memory swap, refusal to allow (most) third party background applications, and Apple's restrictive control of application memory utilization, Apple could make their iDevices function very fast, even with limited memory. Back in those early days it was said that Android devices had to have at least twice as much memory just to be competitive with iPhones. (That may not be accurate but there was certainly a grain of truth to it.)
IOW, I don't think "political" is the right word for it. I think it is a combination of engineering and design choices to maximize performance and profit.
However, that was a long time ago. IMO, virtual memory swap should have been implemented years ago. Then again, Apple may have wanted faster storage speeds before implementing this, and also wanted applications that could actually make use of it. That has come in the last few years.
rafark
macrumors 68020
Jokes aside, Facebook is not a light app/website. It’s actually quite complex and heavy for just a social media site.
rui no onna
Contributor
So’s Twitter website. YouTube desktop website, too. It may not seem like it at times but the apps actually behave better.
If 13” MBA screen can be detached as tablet just like Ms Surface, we don’t need iPad 12.9”. This is the worst scenario Apple afraid of.
The first iPhone had 128Mb of memory with 4 Gb of flash storage. Battery capacity was 5.18 W. The CPU was running at 412 MHz.
Allowing only one app in the foreground with a few background processes, turning off swapping and killing background processes was a great way to achieve performance and increase battery life.
I am still curious, how is the battery life when using M1-only features (like stage manager), given Apple said, it needs high resources.