This article was not supposed to look like this.
iPadOS 16 launched to the public today and carries a lot of expectation on its shoulders: for the first time since the original iPad was introduced in 2010, Apple is embracing a Mac-like windowing system that lets you use up to four windows simultaneously on the iPad screen. You can even resize and overlap them. If you’ve followed the evolution of the iPad for a while, you know that this is very unusual.
But the reason this story had to be different can’t be found in Apple’s design philosophy for iPadOS 16. Normally, MacStories readers would expect a full-fledged “The MacStories Review” to go along with a new iPadOS release. It’s what I’ve been doing for over seven years at this point, and I don’t like to break my writing patterns. When something works, I want to keep writing. That’s exactly why I had to stop writing about iPadOS earlier this summer and until last week.
Stage Manager, the iPadOS markup add-on that lets you multitask with floating windows, started crashing on my M1 iPad Pro in mid-July and wasn’t fixed until early October. When I say “crash,” I mean I couldn’t last more than 10 minutes without iPadOS taking me back to my lock screen and resetting my workspaces. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. For almost two months, I was unable to type with Apple’s Magic Keyboard or use keyboard shortcuts when Stage Manager was active. Before it was pulled by Apple and deferred to a future release, external display support in Stage Manager was impossible to rely on for production work. The list goes on and on and on.
Normally, I’d use the presentation of my iOS and iPadOS reviews to tell you how I’ve been living and working with the new operating system every day for the past three months. I’ve always tried to publish annual OS reviews that are informed by hands-on, consistent use of a new OS, which I hope has resulted in strongly-convinced, well-researched stories that can stand the test of time. It’s not yet possible for me to create that type of story with iPadOS 16.
I’ve effectively been able to use iPadOS 16 again with Stage Manager on my M1 iPad Pro in just the last two weeks. Before, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to use iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager because I hate progress; I literally couldn’t unless I didn’t mind my iPad crashing every 10 minutes. So, at some point over the summer, I made the call to go back to Split View and Slide Over — which are still the default iPad multitasking mode in iPadOS 16 — and I’d jump back into Stage Manager in any iPadOS 16 beta. , Just about two weeks ago, despite some lingering bugs that I’ll get into later, I was able to finally leave Stage Manager enabled and get back to where I was when I posted my iPadOS 16 first impressions article back in July.
In the last two weeks, I was able to use iPadOS 16 again with Stage Manager on my M1 iPad Pro.
Think of my position this way: There’s a hole from early August to early October in my typical “reviewer summer” during which I didn’t get to use the biggest addition to iPadOS 16 at all. The fact that Apple slowed down, weakened and kept repeating Stage Manager until the last minute, seeming to suggest I wasn’t the only one desperately trying to get it to work.
I started using iPadOS 16 and Stage Manager again two weeks ago; what kind of “review” should this be?
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It’s important for me to offer this context up front for two reasons: this isn’t the full MacStories review of iPadOS 16 that I wanted to post today; and, just as importantly, I also know that most people haven’t tested Stage Manager in almost five months like I did.
See, this is the hard part for me here: despite Stage Manager’s many design flaws, its plethora of technical issues, and despite the features that were cut from it when I had to get work done over the last two weeks on my iPad Pro and Stage Manager performed as intended, iPadOS windows felt good. It felt like I was back in July, just before the iPadOS 16 public beta was released, and I—ever the optimist—viewed Stage Manager as the start of something new that Apple would surely refine and polish in the coming months.
All this to say: I’m fully aware that many of you will upgrade to iPadOS 16 today, use it for 10 minutes, think it’s almost fine, and wonder “why was Vitici so upset about this” ?
That leaves me with two options. I could tell you how bad Stage Manager was this summer, how testing it and repeatedly running into bugs and roadblocks nearly sapped my enthusiasm for the iPadOS platform, and how much feedback I reported to Apple about it. But that wouldn’t be an interesting or useful story. Or I could just accept the hand I’ve been dealt and write about the experience I’ve had with Stage Manager (again) over the last two weeks – bugs, missing features, faulty foundation and all.
I chose the latter: it is in my nature to look optimistically ahead to what lies ahead without dwelling on the past; I also think it’s the more nuanced and useful approach that I hope MacStories readers will appreciate.
For better or worse, Stage Manager shows us the trajectory Apple has chosen for the future of the iPadOS platform, and is designed for modularity, power users, and multiple input methods. Plus lots of quirks. And bugs.
Let’s dive in.
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What is Stage Manager?
Stage Manager is an optional new multitasking mode for iPadOS 16 that’s disabled by default and isn’t as extensive as Apple originally showed off at WWDC earlier this year.
Also available in macOS Ventura, Stage Manager is a windowed environment that lets you use up to four application windows on your iPad screen at once, with the ability to organize those windows into workspaces. Windows can overlap and you can even resize them. Stage Manager looks similar to traditional macOS windows and multitasking, but has a few limitations to – according to Apple – “get things done with ease”. For example, you’re limited to four windows in the same workspace, and there’s no real freeform resizing. Stage Manager does not replace Split View and Slide Over. Instead, it’s a specific mode that you have to enable yourself, and when it’s active, the classic split view and swipe aren’t available.
That’s Stage Manager in a nutshell: it’s an additional mode of iPadOS designed to let you work with more apps at the same time with a windowing system that looks like macOS, but is also fundamentally different from it. As I’ll explain later, depending on what you want from a windows-capable laptop, this approach has its own long list of pros and cons.
You can enable Stage Manager in two ways. The first is to go to Settings ⇾ Home screen & multitasking and move the Stage Manager toggle under the Multitasking section. Opening this section immediately reveals the structure of the Stage Manager with a preview of a sample workspace that shows you two elements that you can customize.
By default, the Stage Manager workspace consists of three separate parts: the actual workspace with your application’s window(s) in it; the classic iPadOS dock at the bottom; and a vertical bar of recently used apps and workspaces displayed as live thumbnails on the left edge of the screen. The bar is, along with overlapping windows, one of the defining visual features of Stage Manager, acting as an extension of the regular app switcher (which is still present in iPadOS 16) to give you quick access to up to four recently used apps/tasks spaces.
In this article, I will use the terms “applications” and “workspaces” interchangeably, since in the context of Stage Manager they mean the same thing. You can have a workspace with one application in it and it’s still considered a stand-alone workspace. Apple refers to the bar as showing “recent apps,” but technically these could be workspaces with different apps in them—you get the idea. Don’t think too much about the terminology because even Apple didn’t do it and they get paid to do these things.
Both the Dock and the Ribbon can be individually disabled in iPadOS 16 when Stage Manager is active. When you do this, you get more screen space for your windows, and you can call up both items by “bumping” the pointer to their respective edges of the screen, but you lose the ability to have constant “quick launchers” for apps. Note that if the ribbon and dock are shown and you resize one of your windows to cover them, they will be hidden from view in that case as well.
The second way to enable Stage Manager is from a new toggle in Control Center – the one that looks like a rectangle with three dots next to it.
You can use this button to switch back and forth between “classic iPadOS” and Stage Manager, which can be useful for times when you’re grabbing the iPad from the Magic Keyboard to use it as a tablet and you might want to simplify the interaction with iPadOS. When doing this, iPadOS will do its best to rearrange overlapping windows as instances of Split View; it should also support saving your previous Slide Over configuration when switching between modes.
The button also supports a hidden gesture: long press it and it will expand into a configuration tile that lets you toggle the dock and bar without having to open the Settings app.
The other key elements of Stage Manager are, of course, the application windows themselves. This is where Apple’s approach differs most from macOS’s existing windowing environment, and where you’ll ultimately have to draw the line as to whether you like working with Stage…
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