iPadOS 16 brings one of the biggest upgrades to iPad’s multitasking to date, thanks to the new Stage Manager feature. So far, iPad’s Stage Manager has been met with mixed reviews and criticism of Apple’s decision to limit it to the latest M1 iPad Air and iPad Pro.
In a new interview with TechCrunch, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federigi, outlined the future of Stage Manager, the decision to limit itself to M1 iPads and more.
Craig Federigi’s stage manager:
Regarding criticism of Stage Manager’s support for only the M1 iPad Air and iPad Pro, Federigi explained that one of the biggest challenges is to make sure the feature meets Apple’s expectations for “interactive response.” In essence, this is Apple’s expectation that “any application you can touch should be able to respond substantially instantly.”
According to Federigi, the iPad M1 is the only model that can live up to these expectations thanks to its increased RAM, faster storage and support for changing virtual memory. He explained:
“Only the iPad M1 combines the high capacity of DRAM with very high capacity, high-performance NAND, which allows us to change our virtual memory super fast,” says Federigi. “Now that we allow you to have up to four applications per panel plus four more – up to eight applications to respond instantly and have a lot of memory, we just don’t have that capability on other systems.”
Federico also noted that only the iPad M1 can support the full range of external display functions due to the Thunderbolt port. Graphic representation also played a role in the decision, he added.
“When you put it all together, we can’t give the full Stage Manager experience to any smaller system,” Federigi said. “I want to say that we would like to make it available wherever we can. But this is what it requires. This is the experience we will carry over into the future. We didn’t want to limit our design to anything less, we set a benchmark for the future. “
Looking ahead to the future of Stage Manager, Federigi said Apple is closely monitoring the feedback and response to the feature version included in iPadOS 16 beta 1. As you might expect, Federico has promised that Apple will continue to work on the feature and make improvements over summer.
Federigi noted that Apple already has a number of new features and planned changes:
“We already had a few planned, as they are stage manager for both Mac and iPad,” says Federigi. “And part of the feedback we’ve got is things where we say to ourselves, ‘yes, I mean, this comes in the beginning or the third!’ changes in behavior.
“There’s nothing we’ve seen that makes us think, wow, this is unexpected news. Many of them are either the reaction we expect from people who have not adapted to the system, or in areas where we have in-flight improvements. So yes, we will certainly continue to do that. “
The full TechCrunch interview is worth reading and includes some additional goodies for the Stage Manager development process, why Apple brought it to the iPad and Mac at the same time, and others.
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