Apple: Craig Federighi returns to the restriction of Stage Manager to iPad M1, and promises improvements

In an interview with our colleagues from TechCrunch, the boss of Apple’s software, talks about the gestation, development and limitation of Stage Manager to the most powerful iPads. The result of a vision that sets the bar high and looks to the future.

During the WWDC 2022 opening keynote, Apple went into overdrive to bring iPadOS closer to macOS. It’s the same challenge faced by Craig Federighi’s teams every year. Without distorting the very successful “tablet experience”, they finally need to find a way that gives more fluidity and efficiency to traditional productivity uses, in short, to ensure that the software is up to the hardware and allows use the iPad as a portable PC.

A wave of new features to boost the iPad

This year, the harvest was good. Efforts to strengthen Continuity make it easier and easier to start a task on a Mac and finish it on an iPad, and vice versa, blurring the lines between each product, in order to always offer the best tool for a task. depending on a changing environment or a particular time of day.

The more discreet arrival of Desktop Class Apps on the iPad, which is essentially a tool for developers to adapt their applications by retouching their interface, their possibility of personalization, etc., also promises a move upmarket, and better ergonomics in the more or less long term .

But the bulk of the party is obviously Stage Manager, which is both a new way of presenting applications on iPad to better showcase them and more quickly switch from one to another – better in any case than ‘with Mission Control Where Spacesbut also a little technological monster that requires a lot of effort from iPads.

So much so that Apple has announced that this function will only be available on iPads equipped with an M1 processor, namely the last two iPad Pros, and the very recent iPad Air. After giving us a first series of explanations during a briefing in Apple Park, the Californian giant decided to make a definitive point, no doubt, on the question, and who better than Craig Federighi could make the exercise indisputable.

Stage Manager, after a long road

The big boss of software at Apple discussed in depth with our colleagues from TechCrunch of this subject. We thus learn that Stage Manager is not the result of one, but of two efforts. Two teams, one dedicated to iPadOS and the other to macOS, would have worked on a project intended to offer a new approach to the workspace. Both would have resulted in quite similar concepts, which, when merged, would give Stage Manager.

But it is also interesting to see that this new interface is introduced now, because Craig Federighi’s teams had to prepare the ground, and support or encourage the developers to go in the required direction.

Thus, the applications had to be developed in such a way that they could be easily resized. Functions like Split ViewWhere Slide Overin iPadOS, undoubtedly set the stage by making it possible for apps to be juxtaposed and resized as needed. Slide Over obviously embodies resizing taken to the extreme with a minimalist window that can be displayed as an overlay on the side of the iPad screen.

In a company where hardware and software integration is at the heart of everything, it is also not surprising that once the software evolution was ready, it was necessary that the part hardware follow. This is where the M1 comes in.

A significant need for power at all stages

“From the start, iPad has always maintained an extremely high standard of responsiveness and interactivity”explains Craig Federighi, to remind that suffering regular lags on an Apple tablet is not an option when everything is working well. “When you add multiple apps to that, and a very large display area, you have to make sure that each of those apps can respond instantly to touch with an even greater demand than a PC app. »

It is this very high level of requirement that prompted the boss of Apple’s software to limit Stage Manager to iPads with an M1 chip. Car Stage Manager is based on the more powerful GPU part of the M1s, as well as faster accesses to virtual memory, faster storage modules, and the greater amount of onboard memory. So many points that gravitate and accompany the M1 and are not present without this SoC.

So that applications are always instantly accessible in iPadOS, they had to be loaded permanently into RAM. But by multiplying their number, it was necessary to call in reinforcements, hence the arrival of the swap virtual memory, which uses part of the storage – which must therefore be very fast – as RAM. “Only iPad M1s combine high capacity DRAM with NAND (flash memory – editor’s note) high capacity and high performance »explains Craig Federighi.

Ultimately, it’s not so much the power of the chip, which limits Stage Manager to the M1, but the quantity and quality of real or virtual memory available. Although Craig Federighi specifies that, for Apple, Stage Manager must also be able to be used on an external screen. However, in this case, it requires suitable connectivity and the necessary graphics power. Once again, only the M1 has the shoulders to handle this demand. “When you add it all up, we can’t deliver a full Stage Manager experience on a less capable system”concludes Craig Federighi, adding: “We didn’t want to limit our design to something less good, we define the requirements for the future”.

More progress

Precisely in the near future, over the summer and developer betas, then public, Apple will refine Stage Manager. Some improvements or changes are already planned, and were even before the first feedback. However, do not dream, these optimizations will not allow, except for a miracle, to see Stage Manager running on your new iPad, despite its very powerful A13 Bionic…

The question now is whether Apple will extend over the years its M1 (and following) to its entire range of iPads to allow its entire price range to benefit from this new “office” experience. , or if Stage Manager will remain a differentiating factor in the long term. The iPad Pro and Air, the top of the range for the general public, being reserved the role of tablet-almost PC…

Source :

TechCrunch