We need to stop saying lying or BS. Another example a few years ago the devs stated Nintendo Switch couldn’t run Factorio. But now it can due to performance changes over the years. I don’t sit here and call them liars or say BS!!! As a game developer and software engineer myself I know what these things take.
New iPadOS 16.1 Beta Expands Stage Manager to Older iPad Pro Models, Delays External Display Support
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Unregistered 4U
macrumors G4
Well, seeing as how the only thing not based from iOS is macOS, they wouldn’t even have to merge, just deprecate macOS and boom, done.
Realityck
macrumors G5
This is what happens when you keep promoting a IPad is just like a touchscreen computer in commercials. Instead iPadOS is just a version of iOS designed for iPhones, that allows a bit deeper app interface, and tweaked for no cellular, and larger displays. I wish they would merge the two lines to be honest. (cellular iPad Pro phone)Well, seeing as how the only thing not based from iOS is macOS, they wouldn’t even have to merge, just deprecate macOS and boom, done.
I agree on the Mac point. But I think part of it is them wanting to get faster dropping Intel support so they just have Apple Silicon to support. Not saying it’s right or wrong, but might be the deciding factor to drop support faster.
Ultracyclist
macrumors 6502
Let's say: One would have the restore file... And would opt to restore the iPad M1 to the previous build (the one with external display support).
How would iCloud backup manage and would any problems other than the ones known with that build occur?
How would iCloud backup manage and would any problems other than the ones known with that build occur?
I know you are only kidding but please don't even whisper that. I used to really love my iPad Pro. I drove 3 hours each way on release day to get the very first iPad Pro that was made way back in 2015. But ever since they came out with a mega-powerful M1 iPad Pro that STILL doesn't have a decent file system not to mention true windows, I've been spending my money on M-series Macs.Well, seeing as how the only thing not based from iOS is macOS, they wouldn’t even have to merge, just deprecate macOS and boom, done.
And, frankly, I've gotten to the point where trying to do any serious work on my 2018 iPad Pro has been so frustrating, I've relegated my 2018 iPad Pro to a media consumption device. H*ll, I use my iPad mini 6 far more than I use the iPad Pro. Aside from the difficulty finding and moving files on the iPad Pro (the Files app is NO substitute for Finder), the ridiculously large "pointer" and clumsy support for external mice has me running to my Mac whenever I want to enter significant amounts of text, edit text, or do anything that requires moving around the screen with speed and precision.
If AAPL were trying to get me to deprecate (see, there's that word again) the iPad Pro to a media consumption device and the iPad mini to a great note-taking device that's also excellent for reading and on-the-go media consumption, well they are doing a superb job.
Apple's dogged insistence on differentiating the iPad from the Mac, giving the iPad crippled versions of all the things that make the Mac great (Finder, mouse navigation, overlapping and resizeable windows, Pro apps) is driving devotees like me away from the iPad--and killing the market for updating every 2-3 years. I'm not sure that's what they intended.
OTOH, with Apple Silicon they have done a wonderful job of rekindling my interest in the Mac. That's not a bad thing--but it's not necessarily good for the iPad line. Heck, I even looked at the M2 MacBook Air, compared it with an M1 iPad Pro with comparable specs, and found the MBA more compelling. As always, YMMV.
AppliedMicro
macrumors 68040
Don‘t quite agree with that particular explanation, since Apple has for years supported „more displays at lower resolution/refresh rate - but less displays at higher resolution“ in their products (Macs).
I think that the the base M1 SoC really are limited to driving two displays in their controller - with only one of them through USB-C/Thunderbolt, the other one being the internal display (or HDMI on the Mac mini).
Anyway, I agree that they wouldn’t want to offer „full“ external display support at native resolutions without including their own 5K/6K displays.
They now reconsidered, by „unbundling“ external display support from Stage Managers app-switcher (which was never believable to only run on M1 but not older Pro models) and expanding support for that to older Pro models.
Marswarrior462
macrumors 6502
After using Stage Manager on my 2020 iPad Pro, I can tell it’s quite buggy, especially for a late beta. I’m glad I have it, but Apple should’ve put more effort into squashing bugs this time around. If it’s still unstable by the public release of iPadOS 16.1, Apple should put a beta label on it like they did with Universal Control last spring
Unregistered 4U
macrumors G4
Only slightly kidding. When you think of all the things Apple makes, the products that the fewest people in the world want to buy are Macs… only 20-30 million a year average. Folks that are used to Macs will always want Macs, but they’re not going to live forever. There will come a time when there’s just not that many folks that want a Mac and at that point, just dropping macOS will make more sense than trying to shoehorn whatever’s left in the thing that people aren’t buying (macOS) into the thing that people ARE buying (iPadOS or whatever comes after).
ArkSingularity
macrumors 6502a
I think developers will keep the Mac ecosystem alive even if nothing else does. I can't imagine being forced to do development on a more locked-down iPad ecosystem, there are just too many things that require a more open ecosystem.
I do think you have a good point though, Apple is clearly a bit afraid of cannibalizing the Mac market. If they allowed iPads to run Mac apps (and allowed them to run simultaneously rather than requiring the apps to be on the screen to use CPU resources), a lot of Mac users would switch in a heartbeat.
Ultracyclist
macrumors 6502
Late beta? It’s the first beta with stage manager on your iPad ever.
chucker23n1
macrumors G3
You could’ve convinced me of that ca. 2015, but with the iMac Pro, 2019 Mac Pro, M1 series, etc., they’ve clearly invested a ton into the Mac hardware lineup. They are also doing cross pollination between iOS and macOS where it makes sense, but they aren’t the same.
They wouldn’t have done products like the Mac Studio (or, for that matter, their stupid displays) if “we only sell a few tens of millions of these, total” were their thinking.
Unregistered 4U
macrumors G4
I agree, especially since it only takes a few million developers worldwide to supply products for 10’s of millions of Macs, iPhones and iPads. With Macs being made essentially from iPad tech, I believe they could get as low as a few million Macs a year and still be profitable if the best way to provide iPad apps continues to be Xcode on a Mac. Macs may become the mainframes of the future. Some have seen them, some know of some still being used, but most would rather personally have anything OTHER than them.
I don’t think they’re afraid of cannibalizing the Mac, mainly because cannibalizing the Mac with an iPad takes a user from “optionally” being in the ecosystem to being “required” to be in the ecosystem, and, with that, very likely a paying member of the ecosystem. I would imagine that each Mac user that does nothing more than check email, surf the web and plays games that switches over to the iPad makes Apple far more money than any more expensive Mac would bring in over time.
gnomeisland
macrumors 65816
The bigger news IMHO is that older 11" iPadPros can now use display scaling! I'm loving that. Text/UIX is a tad small but it makes "traditional" multitasking with split screen a bit more useful and reduces the appeal of a 12.9" iPad.
Well they were always right: It couldn't be done and they NEVER did, as connecting a display and making it work.
What they did is that they strip-off / took away the external monitor functionality as a work-around to make it work; making stage manager to need less resources (like less RAM).
So it was true: older iPad Pros can’t handle stage manager, because they did not have enough RAM / processing power to handle the original specs stage manager that included an external monitor.
So they made a mini version of the stage manager, without external screen support, to try to make everyone a bit more happier.
bcortens
macrumors 65816
Stage manager must be implemented in a fairly poor way then... because developers can check app memory usage and many smaller apps struggle to hit 500MB of memory use...
Stage manager is bad for a multitude of reasons and the fact internally they seem to have forgotten how to build a high performance efficient windowing system is pretty sad.
ArkSingularity
macrumors 6502a
Agreed. They managed to make Windows Vista and Windows 7 Aero work flawlessly on comparatively ancient hardware, and some of the visual effects they used back then were more advanced than what they are doing today with simpler, flatter designs. Things are definitely much less optimized than they were in the past, and that's more or less been across the entire industry.
Unregistered 4U
macrumors G4
Must not have been living in the timeline I was in. Don’t think I’ve ever heard Windows Vista deemed “flawless” in any way.
bcortens
macrumors 65816
It’s not just windows, (dating myself) I remember being wowed at how well expose worked on mac OS X panther back in the day. And that was on iMac G3s with a paltry amount of memory and GPU power, I think the GPU had 16 MB of memory though it might have even been just 8MB.
ArkSingularity
macrumors 6502a
It was far from flawless, but the animations and transparent effects were buttery smooth. And that was on integrated graphics chipsets, which were far slower back then than what we have today.
There is no doubt that those OS' were much better optimized than what we have today.
ArkSingularity
macrumors 6502a
I had a Linux computer that I learned to code on as a kid. It had 320MB of RAM and a 600mhz Pentium 3. That thing could handle just about everything I ever threw on it with some of the earlier releases of Ubuntu. I tried more recently to see if Linux would boot on a fairly comparable setup in a VM (actually a better setup, gave it about 20% of a modern core and 512MB of RAM), and it outright refused to boot entirely. Almost all of the mainstream distros would not even boot at all in a live environment, and most of them couldn't even install even without it. Even 1GB of RAM wasn't enough for many of them. (Puppy Linux was the only one that I got working)
Linux is still arguably the most lightweight option around, it's far less demanding on system resources than Windows or Mac OS is today. The fact that even Linux/xfce based systems wouldn't boot on those systems was kinda sad in a way. I know those systems are ancient and nobody really uses them now, but I remember how fast they COULD be. It's sad that relatively new lower end computers that are many, many times faster today can feel so slow just because of software. I'm a developer myself and can say firsthand, we don't optimize things the way that we used to. We just don't.
A lot of that is genuinely because our software is much more advanced now, but I do think that the fact that we are now phasing out 2017 Macs for software updates and are having trouble implementing something as simple as Stage Manager on an iPad that is only a couple of years old points to a lack of general optimization. The limitation is likely more of a RAM limitation (it's going to cause a lot more swap usage if multiple apps are simultaneously running in the background), but the fact that we're having these issues on 4GB iPads shows just how much heavier software has become. Heck, the fact that 8GB is now considered "tight" on the Mac is insane. 8GB used to be what you got when you never wanted to have to worry about RAM, and that was only about a decade ago.
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Unregistered 4U
macrumors G4
Those OS’s, that were far from flawless still managed to be better optimized. They were really well optimized flaws, perhaps.
And there were plenty of systems that had WEI graphic scores of 3 or below where folks were provided tips/tricks on how to improve the performance, like turning off transparency.