As more post-WWDC interviews with Apple’s chief software engineer Craig Federighi come out, we continue to learn more about Apple’s reasoning behind the new iPadOS Stage Manager feature that is limited to iPads with the M1 chip.
The latest interview was published by Forbes contributor David Phelan, who asked Federighi if Apple tried to run Stage Manager with iPad models without the M1 chip. In response, Federighi said Apple did some early testing of the feature on other iPads, but Apple was not happy with the experience delivered on those devices.
“We started some of our prototypes with these systems and it became clear that we couldn’t offer with them the experience we were designing,” he said. “Certainly we would like to bring any new experience to all the devices we can, but we also don’t want to slow down the definition of a new experience and not create the best basis for the future in that experience. And we could really just do it by building on the M1 “.
In a shared interview with TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino earlier this week, Federighi said the performance of the M1 chip ensures that all applications used in Stage Manager are “instantly responsive,” as expected by customers of a touch interface.
In a statement last week, shared by Rene Ritchie, Apple stated that Stage Manager “requires a large internal memory, incredibly fast storage and flexible external display I / O, all of which are delivered by iPads with the M1 chip “.
The iPad Pro M1 is available with up to 16GB of RAM and a Thunderbolt port, while the previous generation iPad Pro includes 6GB of RAM and a USB-C port. The iPad Pro M1 also offers up to 2 times faster storage and up to 40% faster GPU performance compared to the previous model. The fifth-generation iPad Air is also equipped with the M1 chip, but the sixth-generation iPad mini and ninth-generation iPad models are not.
Introduced as part of iPadOS 16, Stage Manager allows users to resize iPad applications in overlay windows to enhance the multitasking experience. The feature is fully compatible with an external display with a resolution of up to 6K, allowing users to work with up to four applications on the iPad and up to four applications on the external display simultaneously. A version of Stage Manager is also available on macOS Ventura to keep windows in front and center.