The Stage Manager controversy doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, despite Apple’s efforts to explain its reasoning for limiting the feature to the M1 iPad.
I expressed my disappointment that my 12.9-inch 2018 iPad Pro won’t get the feature, but it’s an even bigger blow to those who have bought the 2020 model, only to find that it will be powered by iPadOS in just two years. 16 are excluded from the title of the feature. Later …
stage manager controversy
When Apple announced Stage Manager, it said the feature was “enabled with the power of the M1 chip.” This is the type of marketing statement a company often makes, so many of us didn’t read much into it at the time.
In a later press release, all Apple had to say about it:
Available on iPad Pro and iPad Air with M1 chip
No explanation was given at the time, leading iPad owners to speculate.
Apple’s software engineering SVP Craig Federighi later gave this explanation:
According to Federighi, the M1 iPads were the only models that could live up to these expectations, thanks to their increased RAM, faster storage, and support for virtual memory swap. he explained:
“It’s only the M1 iPads that combine high DRAM capacity with very high capacity, high performance NAND that allows our virtual memory swap to be super fast,” Federighi says. “Now that we are allowing you to have up to four apps on one panel and up to four – eight apps to be instantly responsive and have a lot of memory, we don’t have that capability on other systems.”
Federighi also noted that only M1 iPads can support the full width of external display features due to the Thunderbolt port. He said graphics performance also played a role in this decision.
“When you put it all together, we can’t provide the full Stage Manager experience on any less systems,” Federighi says. “I mean, we’d love to have it available everywhere. But that’s what it needs. This is the experience we’re going to take in the future. We didn’t want to force our designs to be a little less, we’re going to take the future.” setting the benchmark for
Some owners suspected that their A12X Bionic or A12Z Bionic iPad might not cope with Stage Manager—especially given that the A12Z chip was powerful enough to run macOS on Apple’s Mac Mini Developer Transition Kit.
However, other people said that RAM may be the explanation here. The DTK had 16GB of RAM, compared to 4GB (2018) or 6GB (2020) for the iPad Pro.
developer guilherme rambo That said other factors may also be at play.
However, there is a difference between a developer kit and a consumer product. The DTK in particular was packaged as a Mac mini, which didn’t have a battery it could drain, and eliminating flash storage with swap wasn’t a concern due to its already limited lifespan.
But it’s not a binary issue
I find all of this believable. That it is not possible to run the Stage Manager feature on the A12X/A12Z iPad Pro model with the level of ability and performance The company wants to offer That the company’s intentions are good, and not based on a desire to sell more iPads.
but …
This is not a binary issue. Not that the stage manager will not work On the 2018-2020 iPad Pro models – in Federighi’s words, non-M1 models may not provide the “full step manager experience.” That it would involve some degree of compromise.
The compromise may just be that older iPads can’t deliver the snappy and smooth animations of the M1 model. It may happen that they do not have enough RAM to cope with eight apps. It could be that they don’t have enough external display bandwidth to deliver a slick experience on a connected monitor without Thunderbolt.
My bet is that most 2018-2020 iPad Pro owners will have a constrained Stage Manager experience, which isn’t the case at all. We will accept four apps instead of eight. We’ll accept a simple animation. We’ll admit the slightly slower switch (and let’s face it, each performance increase offered by each new generation of apps is hardly noticeable in anything other than gaming, so the speed difference will actually be minor).
So my view is that Apple should have simply warned owners of the A12X/A12Z iPad Pro models that they will be getting a limited edition of the feature, which will not match the capabilities and speed of the M1 versions. This will not cause any problems for anyone, and there will be no dispute of the stage manager.
It undermines confidence in the longevity of Apple devices
One advantage of buying Apple devices has always been their longevity. We’re able to buy an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac knowing it will be supported by software updates for 5+ years, and be fully usable for much longer than that.
Barring those of us who are obsessed with gadget-lust, most typical Apple customers will keep Macs for 5-7 years, some for 10 years—and that’s a completely realistic thing. The iPad may be a little faster, but maintaining one for five or more years is again entirely possible.
Sure, the switch from Intel to Apple silicon chips in Macs was a game-changer. The difference in both performance and battery-life was so high that it was completely understandable that it represented a watershed between the old and new generations. It may be someone who bought the last Intel-powered Mac, but that change was inevitable.
But the same kind of watershed doesn’t exist with the iPad. ipad already Runs on chips designed by Apple, and the difference between the A12X, A12Z and M1 is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
So I think it’s totally understandable that owners of 2018 iPads like me are a little annoyed, and owners of 2020 models can be quite annoyed that their two-year-old high-end models are missing out on a key feature of iPadOS. .
There’s Still Time to End the Stage Manager Controversy
It doesn’t have to be a perfect deal. Apple is a stubborn company that doesn’t change its decisions often, but it sometimes does when enough fuss is made, or enough pressure is applied.
I honestly think this would be Apple’s best bet right now. Make a limited edition of Stage Manager available for the A12X/A12Z iPad Pro model, with whatever constraints and expectation-management it deems appropriate.
At least, include it in beta so people can see for themselves how it performs.
This is my view; how about yours? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
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