Twitter, Slack, Outlook and Safari are open at the same time, and I’m browsing and scanning together. This is on my monitor. It’s like any other day. In the meantime, I’m playing Catan on my iPad. All I’m doing is powered by the iPad, with the monitor connected via USB-C as a secondary screen. It almost feels like I’m on a Mac. But I am not.
The iPadOS 16 introduces a feature I’ve wanted on iPads for years: a multi-tasking with several more real windows and real external monitor support for extended workspaces. A public beta preview of the software is now available (which I wouldn’t recommend installing on your personal device every day). How iPadOS makes both happen is the weird part. Navigation needs a lot of delicacy, according to my first experiences so far.
You also need an iPad equipped with M1 to make these new multitasking features work, which means a current model of iPad Pro or iPad Air. No other will be supported. These iPads are expensive, which makes it a professional feature that you may not even consider worth updating yet.
Read more: Review of the iPad Air 2022 (M1).
I could get into other iPad features, but I’ll do it later because, really, that’s this year’s feature. Stage Manager, which enables these additional multitasking benefits, offers a completely new design that is also extremely alien. And that’s the problem with iPadOS now. It’s powerful and it’s weird too and it’s still not quite like Mac.
It looks like Apple is trying to develop a new computer interface, but through small steps and experiments. As the iPad moves between the iPhone and the Mac, takes more parts of each and combines them, the pieces don’t always make sense. This is where I am after testing the public beta: striving to find my iPad sea legs.
The layout of iPad apps on a large monitor is finally useful on iPadOS 16.
Scott Stein / CNET
The good thing: it monitors the magic
Plug in a monitor now, and hey, it’s like a Mac. Applications can be opened on the monitor or iPad, and the mouse or trackpad cursor will move back and forth as on a Mac connected to the monitor. I don’t think Apple’s new Stage Manager will change things much for people working directly on an iPad (see below), but hey, it opens up possibilities if you have a monitor nearby.
Using an iPad Air with Magic Keyboard connected, I just put it in front of my Dell monitor and felt that it was finally becoming a two-screen device. It’s especially weird and fun to control apps with the keyboard and trackpad, while also doing things with the iPad’s touch screen with an app open there. For me it was playing Catan while responding to emails and Slacks. Silly, and also great.
Now I’m playing some John Williams soundtracks while I write and Slacking and I play a bit of Catan and check out Twitter, and that basically seems like my typical day immersed in the screen, but all iPad enabled.
The whole experience reminds me, in many ways, of using Samsung’s DeX, which allows desktop-like computer experiences on your tablets and phones when connected to a monitor. Years ago, I discovered that DeX ended up working surprisingly well, sometimes. Apple is making a kind of move similar to the iPad M1 models, but with a lot of power. Running several applications at once is much more useful than you might think, as you probably do it unconsciously every day on your laptop.
Plug in a monitor and you’ll find that it connects the way monitors should, allowing separate apps to open independently of the iPad screen. In a new display settings feature, you can also choose to mirror your iPad the way only iPadOS previously allowed (who wants that?). Monitor settings allow you to move the second orientation of the screen: If you choose the monitor as “on top” of the iPad, the mouse or mouse cursor will move from the iPad to the monitor as you move up.
There’s also a new additional resolution mode on the iPad screen, which compresses text and apps for “more space”. On the 11-inch iPad Air, it didn’t seem to do much for my work experience other than shrink text. On the larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro, it can make the screen feel more like a laptop.
To get applications to open simultaneously, you need to open them from the dock and drag them into position. The application windows can be adjusted now, but not with complete freedom. Windows can crush and stretch and go horizontal or vertical, but Apple limits sizes and shapes. It seems like a fuzzy experiment to get the design you want. And if the windows get too big, Apple overlaps the windows. But only in very specific ways, so it’s not as free as a normal Mac-based Windows operating system (not Windows-based!).
Multiple windows are less useful on the iPad screen, especially if you don’t have the iPad Pro larger than 12.9 inches (right).
Scott Stein / CNET
The Bad: How does this work, again?
Getting all apps open and working, and figuring out how to navigate them, is another matter. Apple has introduced Stage Manager, a new multitasking manager, but the app / feature is only launched from the Control Center, sliding down and tapping a cryptic icon with a block and three dots. Normally no one will ever know.
It gets weirder. Stage Manager has bundled open application instances, but if one application is already open, you’ll only switch to that instance instead of overlaying it with the other open ones, though you can also drag open applications in and out of it. side dock and in your workspace. On the iPad itself, these other app windows stay open side by side, reducing the display space of the free app. Apps can expand again, but jumping back and forth to choose apps gets confusing quickly. And then there’s this three-point icon above Windows, which still handles app zoom, split screen, and minimization in the same way as the iPad 15. Are you still following me? I hope you are not.
I lost my way, despite being an iPadOS user for a long time. And apps can’t easily be dragged from one window to another either. Just when I started to feel like I was falling into a Mac stream, iPadOS throws me back into a weird valley.
And there are also public beta bugs: Connecting to a monitor turns off the audio on my iPad unless I use headphones. Sometimes I’ve had sudden reboots by accident from too many open apps. And, if I disconnect from the monitor, I find that some application groups have black windows suddenly empty. Oh, and I tried throwing Catan at my monitor and it started sideways. Beta explorers, good luck.
Stage Manager becomes so annoying on the iPad screen that it turns it off instantly, unless I’m connected to a monitor. For me, it’s specifically a multitasking monitor mode.
The deeper I go, the stranger it feels. I try to release Batman Returns on Apple TV to watch it as I type this, and it automatically plays on the monitor instead of my iPad screen. I can scroll the entire video to the monitor completely, but not download it back to the iPad. And then, when I try to change the monitor pages on the iPad screen (which is done using this tiny three-dot icon at the top of each window, it now has a menu that vaguely says “move to show” ), the app suddenly goes blank and I have to force it.
Overall: a step forward (if you like monitors), but weird
The iPad 16 has most of the great successes of iOS 16, minus this new customizable lock screen feature. There’s also a weather app made by Apple, now, finally (jay?). There are more integrated ways to share documents and collaborate in groups using Messages or FaceTime, expanding on what started last year. Apple’s promising collaborative whiteboard app, called Freeform, is not yet in the public beta, but is expected this fall.
I still don’t recommend downloading a beta version of Apple’s public operating system to your main device, because too many weird and bad things can happen. The iPad 16 beta has crashed several times for me.
But just because it can make the M1 iPads use an extra monitor as a real second screen, I’m already thrilled. I just wish the whole Stage Manager process made more sense and allowed for much more fluid or flexible window placement and screen jumping, because right now it looks like a beta feature. Even the way Apple allows you to turn the feature on and off through the Control Center suggests that it may not yet be thought of as an everyday feature, but it is a “professional” feature that you should consciously look for in order to use it.
I like to write and play Catan at the same time, though. It has made having my iPad Pro on my desktop a much more fun and much more productive tool, even if it has made me less productive. Sorry, now it’s my turn. I am going to build a city.