If we see the arrival of the Stage Manager function on iPadOS 16 which improves multitasking, it will only be reserved for iPads with an M1 chip. An Apple software engineering manager discusses the choice of his company.
iPadOS 16 was announced during Apple’s WWDC 2022 conference a few days ago. One of the big changes with the update is improved multitasking with Stage Manager. Only then, this mode which allows you to display several application windows at the same time is limited to the iPad M1. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of engineering, came back to this when answering questions from TechCrunch.
Technical limitations and care given to Stage Manager
According to him, therefore, it was necessary to guarantee that the functionality met Apple’s requirements in terms of “responsiveness and interactivity“. For this, it is necessary that “when adding multiple in-game apps and large amounts of screen real estate, you need to ensure that one of those apps can respond instantly to touch“. Only the iPad M1, by the performance they offer, can meet these criteria. “Now that we allow you to have up to four apps on one panel plus four more […] we just don’t have that capability on other systems“.
Apple has therefore restricted Stage Manager for the sake of taking care of the user experience (UX), even if it means depriving its users of certain functions. This UX can’t be bad if it’s simply absent, Apple isn’t wrong on that, but it’s still debatable. The engineer says:I mean, we’d like to make it available wherever we can. But that’s what it takes. This is the experiment that we will conduct in the future. We didn’t want to limit our design to anything less, we’re setting the benchmark for the future“.
Craig Federighi also clarifies that because these iPads support external display functionality through the Thunderbolt port, the use of an external display is only available for the iPad M1. The performance of the latest touch pads from Apple also played into the balance.
To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS application. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.