{"id":36208,"date":"2022-06-15T16:11:49","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T20:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=36208"},"modified":"2022-06-24T14:32:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T18:32:23","slug":"stage-managers-ipad-requirements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/15\/stage-managers-ipad-requirements\/","title":{"rendered":"Stage Manager’s iPad Requirements"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew Panzarino<\/a> (Reddit<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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This approach to workspace management does appear to be very obviously iPad-centric. But Federighi says that two independent teams at Apple, one working from the iPad side and one working from the macOS side to try to make multiple workspaces more obvious and friendly, arrived at a similar concept and met in the middle. This means, he says, that both perspectives are represented in this approach.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Federighi says that the extremely high bar Apple has for interactive responsiveness was at the core of the issue. On iPad, he notes, there is this tremendously high bar for interactive responsiveness and the experience where every app you can touch needs to be able to respond essentially instantaneously. This meant that, historically, whatever apps were immediately accessible to the user needed to be entirely resident in RAM. Something that has not been true of apps on macOS, which made heavy use of virtual memory.<\/p>\n

In order to reach that level of responsiveness, several factors needed to collide. First, a combination of a lot of RAM and “extremely fast IO virtual memory” were needed to host multiple apps in the active bucket.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As a result, Stage Manager requires an M1 iPad. I honestly don’t understand his argument. I don’t think it’s that pre-M1 iPads couldn’t support virtual memory, since even the A12Z in the DTK did. That processor also had great performance running more simultaneous apps than iPadOS supports. Stage Manager is also supported on older Macs with Intel processors—and older graphics—that are less capable than recent-but-not-M1 iPads.<\/p>\n\n

Then he talks about needing fast flash storage for the virtual memory, which only the M1 iPads have, but PowerPC Macs were using spinning hard drives for virtual memory 20 years ago. Surely those were much slower.<\/p>\n\n

He also says that Stage Manager is a “total experience that involves external display connectivity.” Why is an external display a requirement when most M1 iPad users don’t even use one?<\/p>\n\n

Thomas Brand<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I understand the Stage Manager experience is all about simultaneously running up to 8 overlapping apps on a 6K external display, but at the very least Apple could throw three year old iPad Pro a bone with a minor software update. Bring basic full screen external 4K app support to the 2018 iPad Pro.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Matt Birchler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Let’s say I open up a LumaFusion project that uses 3.5GB RAM. On an iPad with 4GB RAM, that’s basically everything, so when I move LumaFusion to the background and open Safari and Messages, LumaFusion is killed so that I have RAM available what what’s on screen now. That’s reasonable because the app was physically not on screen anymore, so the fact that process was killed doesn’t really impact my usage overall.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

My iPad doesn’t support Stage Manager, so I can’t try it, but I don’t see how this would really be different than with regular iPad multitasking. External displays aside, you aren’t actually in more apps at the same time. Yes, you see images of their windows, but that’s also the case with the app switcher or with Exposé on the Mac. You don’t need the app’s full memory footprint to show what its window looks like.<\/p>\n\n

Switching to an app that isn’t fully in RAM will be slower, sure, but that’s already the case with iPad multitasking today. Also, apps use different amounts of memory, so given how Stage Manager supports 8 apps, there are probably cases where it’s slower on an M1 than fewer\/smaller apps would be on lesser hardware. So it’s not as though the M1 baseline guarantees a more responsive experience.<\/p>\n\n

Joe Rossignol<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The latest interview was published by Forbes contributor David Phelan, who asked Federighi if Apple attempted to make Stage Manager work 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 satisfied with the experienced delivered on those devices.<\/p>

“We began some of our prototyping involving those systems and it became apparent early on that we couldn’t deliver the experience that that we were designing toward with them,” he said. “Certainly, we would love to bring any new experience to every device we can, but we also don’t want to hold back the definition of a new experience and not create the best foundation for the future in that experience. And we really could only do that by building on the M1.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Andrew Cunningham<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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it’s not unreasonable to expect a 14-month old $1,000+ computer to support new OS features, and if Apple couldn’t do that, they should have designed the feature differently.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Damien Petrilli<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The question isn’t about why the windowing system requires M1 iPads hardware.<\/p>

The real question is why Apple didn’t manage to ship a windowing system working on most iPads which are far more powerful than any intel-Macs, knowing macOS had a windowing system since the 80s.<\/p>

Apple controls everything at every level. Yet with this luxury, they manage to support less hardware for shorter time than Microsoft which must supports everything from netbook to workstation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Streza<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Without the might of the M1 chip, this computer wouldn’t be able to perform the crushing task of running a window manager.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Filipe Espósito<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As noted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a> on Twitter, the base model of the iPad Air 5 is not compatible with virtual memory swap. That’s probably because the 64GB of internal storage is not enough for memory swapping. As Apple quietly suggests on its website<\/a>, memory swapping on the iPad requires at least 128GB of storage in addition to M1.<\/p>

This is totally understandable, but then comes the question: Why does Apple keep saying that virtual memory swap is a requirement for Stage Manager when the 64GB iPad Air 5, which supports Stage Manager, clearly has no virtual memory swap?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

paul<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If your window management software is so resource heavy that an iPad with an A12Z processor aka “faster than most windows laptops” cant run it, then maybe it’s time to reconsider your approach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Dmitrii<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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You either claim this, or you claim that you can’t show app previews side by side. You can’t do have both.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Meek Geek<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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If after all this, Apple still won’t budge, then maybe it’s time for these myths to die?<\/p>\n