Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
New iPadOS 16.1 Beta Expands Stage Manager to Older iPad Pro Models, Delays External Display Support
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That's what I keep thinking
Everyone I know with iPads uses them in very simple and straightforward ways.
It was sort of a key selling point of the device at one time.
A "smaller touchscreen sort of kind of like maybe can do some Mac style stuff" device .... is of very limited interest and , for Apple, as we are finding out, makes for a very unfocused mess on the development side.
The number of windows is irrelevant, it's the apps those windows run. Right now a single Lightroom window uses 3.5 GB of RAM alone whereas I have six Word documents open and it uses 600 MB. Even the four windows that Stage Manager on an A12X/Z system is limited to would be challenged by having Lightroom, Photoshop, ProCreate, and Safari with multiple tabs open at once. When iPadOS runs out of RAM it suspends apps and forces them to reload. On my old iPad with 3GB of RAM if I had a large image project open in Affinity Photo and went into Safari to grab a stock image there was a good chance by the time I came back to Affinity the app would reload because the system ran out RAM between just those two apps. Try opening those 72 Safari tabs you mentioned on an iPad and see how many of them you can come back to without them having to reload because Safari ran out of memory.
Would you really want to use it tho?
People who have tried it say that the 11" screen is almost too small for it and you wouldn't get external display support.
As a 2020 iPad Pro owner I knew this would happen lol. There was no way stage manager would only work with M1+ but you had people here saying that chip had special bandwidth or whatever that the other chips didn’t have and that’s why it was exclusive. What a load of crap.
The 2018/2020 iPads are still plenty powerful today will be for years to come. They will keep going strong until RAM becomes an issue.
The 2018/2020 iPads are still plenty powerful today will be for years to come. They will keep going strong until RAM becomes an issue.
As I said back then, one important limit, if not the main one, is the fact that only M1 can support 5k/6k displays.
CPU is definitely not a limitation. RAM is a limitation, but then you can reduce the number of windows (which is what they did now), and memory swap is not a hard condition for Stage Manager, since the 64GB Air does not support it.
One thing people underestimate is that Apple wants to push iPad users to buy accessories like the MK, the pencil etc. Now they cannot make external display support exclusive to their monitors, but they can at least make sure they are supported.
They did the exact same thing with M1/M2 Macs. Why do they only support one external display? Because they cannot run 2 5k/6k displays. Could they run dual 4k? Very possible. Could they run 1440p and 4k? Obviously. But not 2 6Ks plus the internal display. Maybe not even 6k + 4k... So what do they do? They remove the option of a second external monitor entirely... This way their displays will always work.
Having said that, for many, external display support was all they wanted, and while just Stage Manager is probably better than nothing, without external display support, it's really not a big deal, especially as it is now (hopefully they will improve it). Something only 2 apps supported on an external display and 2 on the iPad would have been a much better solution for most users. But A12X/Z can't run Apple displays... (even A12Z under MacOS could not)
So why did they backtrack and even give stage manager to A12X/Z? They are having a hard time with it and they are realizing monitor support is not ready for prime time, just like Universal control wasn't last year, but they knew people would rant. So IMO they decided to throw a bone at old iPad pro users, so that at least this hits the news and not the fact that monitor support is not ready and may not be until next year....
PS Concerning your other questions: no, A12 has half the cores are A12X, first gen pro is even worse, it's just dual core. 2 gen has 3 cores. A14 has more powerful cores, but again less than A12X and multicore is probably more important for stage manager than single core, or maybe, A14 4GB is coming to the iPad 10 next month and they don't want it on the cheaper iPad 10 so they decided not to give it to the air 4 either....
Last edited:
The M1 iPad Air which does support it has the same screen size as the iPad Air 4
Ram is an issue which is why you get less than 50% of its capabilities.
Imagine the same company said this and also kept the series 3 Apple Watch around for ….5 years
Unfortunately, this isn’t true when it came to disallowing editing and deletion of iMessages. Even after victim advocacy groups expressed concerns of potential abuse by perpetrators by deleting or editing their harassing messages, Apple didn’t give users a way to opt out. https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/15/imessage-edit-delete-button-issues/
Because some do care how apple tweak their experience? Because some do wish apple do Better but choose to express hate in a way to pressure apple? Or simply because they care apple as a company like we care about a stranger, and don’t give a **** about how they feel?
And, despite everything apple has been doing not quite right or outright wrong, Apple STILL offer the best possible package of hardware and software in the entire market to many, many people. Nothing is perfect, but some are less imperfect than others.
I didn't see an M1 requirement for the Ventura Stage Manager, but this thread covers running Ventura on unsupported Macs.
My understanding is a little different. What I understand is that by limiting external support and reducing by half the number of apps active in Stage manager, they are able to extend the feature to older iPads. Maybe it is still all BS, but I think this is the logic to justify the change.
At least they figure this out.
Game, mail, team and of course safari running and game available to play on its own simultaneously. This is what stage manager should’ve been when it’s fully available, better than split view, slide over and all.
Here is another example:
Game, mail, team and of course safari running and game available to play on its own simultaneously. This is what stage manager should’ve been when it’s fully available, better than split view, slide over and all.
Here is another example:
Last edited:
iPad Mini 6 would be nice... Yep, even with the smaller screen.
The most recent beta of iPadOS 16.1 expands the controversial Stage Manager feature to older iPads, allowing it to work with iPad Pro models that have an A12X or A12Z chip, according to information Apple provided to Engadget.
The beta also removes the external display support from Stage Manager for the current time, with the feature set to return in a later iPadOS 16 update. Apple's statement on the matteruring the iPadOS 16 beta testing period, Stage Manager has been limited to the M1 iPad Pro models that were released in 2021, and the M1 iPad Air. Every other iPad was unable to use the feature, including 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models that use the A12X and A12Z chips. Apple maintained that it was not able to offer acceptable performance on non-M1 iPads because the feature requires "large internal memory, incredibly fast storage, and flexible external display I/O" provided by the M1 iPad models.
Apple was reportedly unsatisfied with the Stage Manager experience on older iPad Pro models. "Certainly, we would love to bring any new experience to every device we can, but we also don't want to hold back the definition of a new experience and not create the best foundation for the future in that experience. And we really could only do that by building on the M1," said Apple's Craig Federighi.
Apple has received ongoing criticism for limiting such a major feature to its newest hardware, leading the company to figure out a way to expand the functionality to additional iPads. The removal of the external display feature in Stage Manager may be what is allowing Apple to offer a suitable experience on non-M1 hardware, but when external display support is reintroduced, it will be limited to the M1 iPad models and will not be available on the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pros.
Stage Manager is now available on all M1 iPads along with the 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models from 2018 and 2020, so long as the latest iPadOS 16.1 beta is installed. Note that Apple is calling this beta iPadOS 16 beta 10.
Article Link: New iPadOS 16.1 Beta Expands Stage Manager to Older iPad Pro Models, Delays External Display Support
Sure, i just dont want the annoying vertical black bars on the external display.
That is messier looking than it needs to be. Because they didn’t implement a Mission Control/expose style window viewer they have to keep all apps partially visible - it would make more sense to be able to put windows fully on top of each other some times.
All of this makes me even more annoyed that Apple can't fix the simple problem of driving external displays at anything other than 4:3. I don't even want Stage Mangler with it's multi-window compositing. Just give me the standard UI rescaled to 16:9 or whatever, with black bars on the internal display. Super useful for when I want to travel light but still present/project or use external screen. 10x more useful than this feature nobody asked for.
Can't argue that the hardware can't do it. It already works for video playback, and the mirrored output is 1080p with side bars.
Can't argue that the hardware can't do it. It already works for video playback, and the mirrored output is 1080p with side bars.