Image via Apple
Apple introduced Siri with the iPhone 4s in 2011. It was initially developed as a standalone app for iOS in 2010, and was going to spread to Android. Instead, Apple bought it and locked Siri to the Apple ecosystem. Apple would wait until 2012 to bring Siri to the iPad, and didn’t support older models. Siri worked perfectly fine on older models, as did other voice recognition. Hell, we had voice to text on our flip phones. Obviously, Siri would work on the iPads introduced before 2012.
But Apple didn’t include it.
Apple likely saw that iPad users don’t upgrade as often as iPhone users. iPhone users typically got a new phone every two years, as carrier contracts often subsidized the price of any phone over 24 months. But the iPad didn’t have that, and it was expensive. Apple needed a reason to push people to upgrade, and Siri was that reason.
Now, Apple has dumped a fortune into developing their own processors for their Macs and now the iPad. The M1-powered iPad Pro and iPad Air are overpowered, with desktop power in a tablet. Apple never fully took advantage of the processing power in the A-series chips in their iPads, preferring to leave plenty over overhead for future updates. But now Apple’s withholding updates from devices that aren’t even two years old. Stage Manager won’t come to the previous version of the iPad Air or the iPad Pro. iPads have been able to run 4 apps simultaneously for years, and jailbreaks have enabled multitasking features like Stage Manager for quite some time as well.
Apple put an M1 in the iPad. That must have been a lot of expensive research and development. However, the M1 may not have been the selling point they wanted it to be, especially with iPadOS 15. Could Stage Manager be little more than a marketing push for Apple’s latest iPads?
In This Article:
Stage Manager and the iPad Pro/Air
The M1 in the iPad Air 5 certainly outperforms the A14 in the iPad Air 4. The results for the single core benchmarks on Geekbench are close, but multi-core tests show a larger difference. Graphics tests do as well, between the iPad Pro with the M1 chip and the iPad Air with the A14. There’s definitely a leap in performance for multitasking. It’s why the iPad Pro at the time still used the A12Z processor. That chip design was specifically made for more multitasking, with more memory as well. Apple put the A12Z in an iPad Mini body for developers to work on their Apple silicon apps. The A12Z was good enough for macOS… but not a single, tightly controlled iPadOS feature? What gives?
“It’s only the M1 iPads that combined the high DRAM capacity with very high capacity, high performance NAND that allows our virtual memory swap to be super fast. Now that we’re letting you have up to four apps on a panel plus another four — up to eight apps to be instantaneously responsive and have plenty of memory, we just don’t have that ability on the other systems.”
– Craig Federighi, SVP of Software Engineering at Apple
Apple claims the new Stage Manager has high system requirements. Notably, it is capable of running eight apps at once, up from the four that was previously the iPad maximum. On top of that, there are graphics effects, like shadows and reflections, and the ability to push video out to an external monitor. All of this requires the additional power of the M1 chip.
But the M1 only has 2GB more RAM than the 2020 iPad Pro. That’s not much, right? Unfortunately, for older iPad owners, the M1 chip is better at handling virtual memory. Virtual memory is when items can no longer be stored in memory and are instead stored on disk. The M1 can do this far faster than Apple’s A-series chips, which means it has more wiggle room for memory overflow.
But why not just limit the apps that are running then? Stage Manager could just run two or three windows groups. It could reduce the number of items on the screen. That… is actually a good question. Since the iPad already can run up to four apps simultaneously, and has been able to do so for many years, why not just reduce Stage Manager to four to six apps on older hardware? You could have it scale down to two for even older devices, and keep the feature off of iPads that are older than three or four years old.
Problem solved.
Well, then they’d have to make a feature exclusively for older hardware, and that’s not going to sell more iPads now, is it?
External Displays?
“We also view Stage Manager as a total experience that involves external display connectivity. And the IO on the M1 supports connectivity that our previous iPads don’t, it can drive 4K, 5K, 6K displays, it can drive them at scaled resolutions. We can’t do that on other iPads”
– Craig Federighi, SVP of Software Engineering at Apple
Apple sees the external display as an integral part of Stage Manager. Older iPads can mirror their display, they can share a mouse and keyboard with a Mac, but they cannot have an external display running with its own resolution, independent of the iPad. They simply don’t have the power or even the throughput through the USB-C port to do this. While you can mirror your display, you cannot extend your monitor.
It seems silly to tie these two features together though. I can’t use multiple windows because I don’t have another monitor? The point of multiple windows on one screen is that you don’t have another monitor!
You could easily have Stage Manager without the external monitor. It feels like Apple’s tying the two together as an excuse, not as a design necessity. That’s what really makes Apple’s response feel hollow, even more than their inability to scale the feature at all. Why lump these two separate features together in your explanation for why the M1 is needed if the actual Stage Manager feature itself is supposedly also doing too much? Suddenly Apple’s response doesn’t feel genuine.
The Unsurprising M2
Screenshot via Rene Ritchie’s video here, from WWDC Keynote.
The M2 processor largely improves over the M1 with reduced heat. By reducing heat, it can keep performance up longer, showing performance gains. They’re not overly significant, but these are noticeable year over year gains. It’s also a larger chip. Physically, I mean. The M2 is larger than the M1. It could provide more surface area for cooling and transistors, though that’s over-simplistic. The important thing to note here is that the M2 does not out-perform the M1 Pro or M1 Max. It is a better chip than the M1, but not by a wild amount. It largely uses Apple’s existing chip technologies in better ways.
That’s fine. Chips shouldn’t be a massive leap forward every year. It’s a good evolution, and shows Apple’s on the right path. Reducing heat and small performance improvements are going to be the norm. Leaps in performance are more rare, and the product of years of work.
But the important thing is that the M2 isn’t going to drive sales. It’s not going to be breaking news. Not like the M1 was. Apple needs continued attention on their silicone or the magic will fade and people will just see them as chips that power Apple’s devices, unimpressive outside of Apple’s ecosystem. Apple needs to brand these chips. What better way to make them seem so much more powerful than their previous counterparts by releasing something so specifically targeting areas the M-series beats A-series processors that it can only be on devices with the M-series processor? It’s as though they started with the M1 and worked their way towards a piece of software to excuse not releasing it for most iPads.
The Unimpressive iPadOS 15
When Apple put the M1 chip in last year’s iPads, many people asked, “Why?” Why bother? iPadOS 15 had no desktop-class features that would require it. The A14 and A12Z chips were powerful enough to run actual desktops. In fact, the A12Z processor did run a Mac. So what’s the point of a Mac chip in an iPad?
If you put a lot of power in something that can’t make much use of that power, people aren’t going to buy it. Many pros likely sat back and said, “I’ll wait to see if these are worth the upgrade.” Until iPadOS 16, they weren’t. In fact, with iPadOS 16, they’re still probably not.
Stage Manager is neat, but is it going to revolutionize how people use their iPads? Probably not. It’s far better for multitasking to have two apps side by side than to use floating windows on a small screen. The fact that these apps can run in the background is great, and the external monitor support is as well, but most people looking for those kinds of features likely already have a Mac that does the job for them. Stage Manager is mostly good for people who are buying a new device to be their only device for school or at home. It makes the iPad better for those people thinking of getting either a Mac or an iPad. Your workflow doesn’t need Stage Manager though, even if you are on an iPad older than 1 year old.
Marketing and Sales?
Image via Apple
Is it possible that the A14 just couldn’t keep up with the M1? Sure. It’s a large gap in performance and Stage Manager targets the features the A-series chips lack specifically. There’s less multithreading power and less memory in the last version of the iPad Air and iPad Pro over the current generation. Apple could throttle background apps, or simply not run them. Apple chose to have four background sets of apps. They could have easily cut that in half for the iPad Air or iPad Pro. After all, even older iPads, like the first generation iPad Pro, could run four apps at once. There are certainly optimizations Apple could have made to run Stage Manager on the 4th generation iPad Air or the previous iPad Pro. But why?
Pretend you only care about short term profits and assume guaranteed customer loyalty. Apple almost can do that. Why would Apple put in extra effort to support a feature on older devices? By not doing that work, they can market their chips as being so much more powerful, while also giving users a new reason to upgrade.
Stage Manager may not be overly useful for the iPad workflow anyway. It’s little more than a pretty dock that runs apps in the background better. The truth is, the multitasking on the existing iPads may be more efficient for your workflow. Still, it’s a little sneaky of Apple to try the “Siri won’t work on the iPad 2” trick again. People buy Apple products because Apple continues to support them for many iterations. Now they’re abandoning hardware that’s barely two years old. That unflappable customer dedication won’t last forever.
Or Maybe It’s Fine?
Apple’s 2-year-old iPads might not be able to run Stage Manager in any capacity. Apple hasn’t claimed that, but they’ve said that it can’t run it the way they want it to, though their expectations are higher than consumers’. We may find out in due time when developers and hackers find ways to get Stage Manager running in some capacity on these older devices. Apple certainly has to withhold features from older electronics, and with the introduction of the M-series processors, Apple’s leaped over their own performance benchmarks. Maybe abandoning relatively new hardware isn’t so bad, if it means expanding upon what makes an iPad in the future. But Apple’s messaging hasn’t been clear, avoiding answering questions like, “Why does it need to be this way, why can’t it scale?” That makes consumers suspicious of their motives and explanations.
Really? It just stings. That’s not going to be a feeling that’s easy to explain away or forget.