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Apple’s Craig Federighi says Apple is aware of the criticism of Stage Manager on the iPad and that solutions were already planned for the next beta versions.
One of the most prominent and popular features of iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura is Stage Manager, but it has been criticized. Mostly beta testers have complained that the iPad version is limited to those few iPads with an M1 processor.
Apple says this is due to the hardware limitations of previous iPads, and in a new interview with TechCrunch, Federighi stresses how they would have liked to add it to each iPad.
“I mean, we’d like to make it available wherever we can,” he said. “But that’s what it takes.”
“From the beginning, the iPad has always maintained this extremely high standard of responsiveness and interactivity,” he continues. “This direct interaction in which each application can respond to every touch instantly, as if touching the real under the screen.”
“And I think sometimes it’s hard for people to appreciate the technical limitations that come with it,” Federighi said. “It’s just the M1 iPads that combined high-capacity DRAM with very high capacity and high NAND performance that allows our virtual memory exchange to be very fast … we just don’t have that capability on other systems.”
“This is the experience we will bring to the future,” he said. “We didn’t want to limit our design to something minor, we’re setting the benchmark for the future.”
Improvements are coming
However, beyond the criticism of the hardware limitation, Federighi says that comments on Stage Manager for iPad have included other points that Apple has also seen.
“We already had plans for the stage manager on both the Mac and the iPad,” he says. “And some of the comments we’ve received are things like ‘yes, I mean this comes to seed two or seed three!’ We already have these things identified, either this or mistakes or just incomplete elements or tweaks to behavior. “
“There’s nothing we’ve seen that makes us think, wow, that’s unexpected news,” Federigi continued. “Many of them are the reaction we expect from people who have not adapted to the system or in areas where we have in-flight improvements. So yes, we will certainly continue to do so.”
Federighi did not specify any of the Stage Manager’s criticisms, nor did he talk about when the next beta versions will be released. Despite its comments on fixes and improvements, however, AppleInsider tests show that Stage Manager for iPad is already a very welcome update.