New iPadOS 16.1 Beta Expands Stage Manager to Older iPad Pro Models, Delays External Display Support

[ArkSingularity]

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.

True, and well-optimized flaws is a good way to put it.

Those were on graphics chipsets that were comparatively ancient though. I had a Windows 7 system a long time ago that ran buttery smooth on an integrated graphics chipset paired with an Athlon X2. It geekbenched about 1/3 of the performance of the i5 in a 2012 macbook pro, and the graphics performance was about 1/10 the performance of that same i5's integrated graphics It handled animations and transparency very smoothly and everything opened almost instantly.

I gave that same computer away to a friend recently (they literally had no computer at all, so to them it was amazing). I installed Windows 10 on it first and had to disable ALL graphics animations and eye-candy, it was choppy even trying to load the start menu. Most apps still were fairly snappy to launch (it's not like Chrome is heavy until you start opening 20+ tabs), but it was a lot slower to boot and background tasks hogged a significant percentage of the CPU. And graphics, oh my. That thing felt like it was from the 90s on Windows 10, it performed that badly. And this same machine ran Windows Aero flawlessly.

Granted, nobody has to optimize things for machines from 2009 anymore (and to be fair, it'd probably be a waste of Apple's time to try to make Mac OS monterey work on ancient pre-2009 hardware, very few would use it), but when it comes to eye candy, it's definitely possible to make these kinds of effects work VERY smoothly on this kind of hardware. If it performs poorly on anything even remotely recent (I'd say made in the last 10 years or so), I'd say it's much more likely that it is poorly optimized than it is to be an actual hardware limitation IMO.

 

[bcortens]

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.

I think that app ram usage is a red herring. Even an 8GB M1 iPad is going to have to kill apps and relaunch them (even if you only have 4 apps on screen) if you have a few apps that are really heave users of memory.

A window manager shouldn't need to keep the entire app in memory just to show a window for it. We can already see with iPadOS 15 how the multitasking browser shows the last known state of windows that were clearly removed from memory and yet I can drag one of these killed apps onto a fullscreen app to create a split view and then select that view it will reload that app just fine.

Heavy software shouldn't mean a poorly performing window manager, my Mac can be at max ram usage and nearly locked up and yet mission control can still smoothly animate to show my windows. That is likely because of legacy exposé code from 2004ish that was written for weaker hardware.

Apple should be incredibly embarrassed that they can't make a decent window manager for iPadOS (also that they can't get even fullscreen/split-view external monitor support working on the A12 series). I have issues with Stage Managers broken and terrible UX design but that is another topic.

 

[chucker23n1]

A window manager shouldn't need to keep the entire app in memory just to show a window for it. We can already see with iPadOS 15 how the multitasking browser shows the last known state of windows that were clearly removed from memory and yet I can drag one of these killed apps onto a fullscreen app to create a split view and then select that view it will reload that app just fine.

Yes, but you’re basically dragging a static image (if the app has been suspended). You can often tell, because once you actually switch to the app, it immediately updates.

Stage Manager, in contrast, allows resizing. So static images aren’t an option; the app needs to react to changes in the size class.

 

[bcortens]

Yes, but you’re basically dragging a static image (if the app has been suspended). You can often tell, because once you actually switch to the app, it immediately updates.

Stage Manager, in contrast, allows resizing. So static images aren’t an option; the app needs to react to changes in the size class.

I suppose that's true, it does that rather badly though, resizing with snapping kind of randomly...

However this doesn't address my point that even high memory capacity iPads will have to handle the case where they run out if you have a very demanding apps running. For lightweight apps even my 4GB iPad Pro can keep at least 6 in memory without reloading them (possibly more but I only tested up to 6).

I just turned stage manager back on to see it again, and I remember why I turned it off. It ruins the multitasking switcher by grouping all apps by windows together...

I'll say it again, they had a perfectly good metaphor in mission control, an updated version for iPad would have worked far better than stage manager. Mission control (because it has Exposé) would allow windows to fully obscure other windows which would eliminate the need for the unpleasant jump-snap resizing, just multitasking-swipe to get to windows you've obscured.
Mission control would also preserve the non-overlapping nature of the multitasking switcher and keep the visual-spatial- layout of window positioning which helps people find windows they are looking for because they don't get buried in a stack of windows from the app. I have 6 safari windows open, with stage manager off, I just swipe to multitasking and find the one I want, with it on I have this annoying stack and it takes longer to get to it. Never mind that it also sticks slide-over apps in the same stack...

At least the old multitasking switcher had a sense of spatial organization. Something Mission Control would also have.
Your resizable apps would live in different Spaces (now called desktops but for iPad OS spaces is a better descriptor) and when entering the multitasking switcher they would still be recognizable as spaces instead of just being one among many overlapping stacks of app windows.

Of course there are needed modifications, the Spaces bar at the top should always be expanded and would have to include the slide over windows too. Slide over would also have to be enhanced to slide over a 'space' filled with resizable windows and be able to slide over the home-screen to fully fix the random window issues.

Edit follow up:
I keep stage manager off because it is buggy and worse for multitasking in many ways. It is not a clear win. However I do have the display scaling turned on and it is a really nice new feature, it seems to have no performance impact and lets me use two apps side by side in split view with both being the regular size class on my 11" iPad Pro so I do think that Apple can still make positive changes to the OS, this just isn't one of them.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Someone handed out all the nostalgic rose colored glasses in this thread.