Apple backtracks and will extend Stage Manager multitasking support to older iPads

Enlarge / True external display support is coming to M1-powered iPads in iPadOS 16. Apple

When Apple delayed iPadOS 16 in August, one of the main culprits was the new "Stage Manager" multitasking feature. Stage Manager was supposed to extend a new multi-window multitasking model to the iPad, but developers and people who cover Apple for a living have been complaining about stability and unpredictable behavior for months, issues that were still present even in recent betas. Controversially, the feature also required a recent M1-powered iPad Pro or Air to work.

In the beta of iPadOS 16.1 shipping today, Apple is reducing the scope of Stage Manager and adjusting its system requirements. According to a statement from Apple provided to Engadget, the company "has been working hard to find a way to provide a single-screen version [of Stage Manager]" for users of the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models.

These models have less RAM and a less powerful processor than the iPad Pro M1 and the fourth generation iPad Air. But with their four efficiency cores and four performance cores, the A12X and A12Z chips were clearly dry runs for the M1, and they're still powerful enough to run iPadOS and its apps well - it's nice to see them support for The manager too.

Stage Manager has also been designed to extend to external displays, replacing the basic screen mirroring that most iPads can now perform. Apple says external display support will remain exclusive to the iPad M1 and newer, and will be deferred to an iPadOS update "later this year".

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Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said in an interview earlier this year that Stage Manager only happens on iPad M1s because those models have extra RAM and faster flash memory (to switch to iPad storage when RAM is full) that were needed for the feature to work properly. But Federighi was also talking specifically about a version of Stage Manager with eight applications running at the same time, four on the iPad screen and four others on an external screen. Limiting Stage Manager on older iPads to a single screen, and therefore a total of four apps, instead of eight, was apparently a viable trade-off for performance on older devices.

The public version of iPadOS 16 should be released in October. The developer beta that adds Stage Manager to older iPads is now available, and the public version should be available within a few days.