- Hey, what's up?
MKBHD here and I've been using iPad OS 16
on the new iPad Pro for a little while,
and one of the biggest new features on it
is called Stage Manager and I have a theory about it.
(upbeat music)
Now, a lot of iPad power users like myself
have been excited for this feature to drop
because we've been waiting for a sort of Mac-like,
real multi-tasking experience on the iPad.
So Stage Manager comes along
and it is technically a multi-tasking UI,
but the more I use it,
the more I can sort of crystallize this theory in my head,
which is that Apple doesn't seem to want the iPad
to do anything the same way that Mac does it.
Now this goes back a long way.
When the iPad first came out,
it was more or less a gigantic iPhone,
but it's slowly gotten more and more powerful
in front of our eyes.
Until this point, we have $1,000 iPad Pro
with a 13-inch mini LED display and a whole M1 chip inside,
the exact same chip that's in some
of the most popular computers that they make.
But the iPad software has stayed remarkably consistent,
which is a nice way of saying.
It hasn't advanced quite at the same rate as this hardware.
So a lot of people have big iPad dreams
of wanting this to be their only computer
and have it be just as capable as any other computer,
but it hasn't been and that's been the biggest knock
on the iPad for a while.
Now sure, we've gotten some stuff,
we have widgets on the home screen since iPad OS 15,
we have our split screen apps,
we have our slide over apps and all this stuff.
But again, you'll notice that they specifically
don't do anything here the same way they would on a Mac.
They always wanna find a new iPad way of doing it.
Like when the iPad first got a trackpad and mouse support,
that was a big deal, we were waiting for that.
But instead of a normal mouse,
we got this unique circle pointer thing
that floats between possible touch targets,
very much the iPad way.
Remember when I asked Craig Federighi
why there wasn't a dedicated weather app
and calculator app on the iPad?
This was his answer.
The iPad still does not have a default weather
and calculator app, and they wanna know why.
- You know, there's some things that we have not done,
because to do it, we would wanna do something
really distinctly great in that space.
And I think it's obviously easy to create a calculator app.
But creating one that feels like,
wow, this is the greatest iPad calculator app,
that it felt, like I think we wanna do it
when we can do it really, really well.
And we honestly have just haven't gotten around
to doing it great.
So that day may come but...
And weather, it would be, be easy enough
to scale up our additional, our existing weather app,
but we feel like,
what would a great weather app for iPad be like?
Let's do that before we do it.
- I suppose that makes perfect sense.
But listening back to that two years later,
it sounds even more like, "We haven't really gotten around
to doing it the iPad way yet."
Even the headline on Apple's website for iPad OS 16,
"Incredibly capable. Unmistakably iPad."
So when it comes to multitasking,
this is like the last big hurdle on the iPad's way
to finally feeling like it's a real computer.
We all know what we expect multitasking to look like
on a normal computer, like a Mac.
But in accordance with my theory and I can't prove it,
but this is just my theory
is Apple doesn't ever want the iPad's multitasking
to look or feel or work like it does on a Mac.
They've gotta find a iPad way of doing this.
Now to throw a wrench in my theory,
this is also coming to the Mac in the latest version,
but the latest feature here is called Stage Manager,
and it's not bad.
It's just an inherently new different way
of doing multitasking on a touch screen
or on a monitor like this,
and it's just another thing you're gonna have to learn
to get the most out of this thing.
So basically, what it looks like is,
you enable it in the Settings,
then toggle it on in Control Center.
Once you do, you can open up an app to bring it on stage.
And then off to the left here,
you have your recent apps that are off stage.
So you're on stage app, it's a window.
It isn't quite full screen.
And so you can drag the corner and move it around
and you can see that there's a bunch
of slightly different predetermined window sizes.
It's not perfectly fluid.
It's just a bunch of sizes that Apple picked.
And then you can bring other apps from off stage
to be on stage at the same time,
so now this is officially the first time
you can have more than one windowed app open
at the same time on the iPad.
And again, you can mess with the sizes,
you can group apps together,
and then you can bring them on or off stage at will.
So it is still definitely very much
not the same thing as multiple windows open on a computer
with the little buttons in the corner,
and then fully fluid window sizes and all the stuff,
but it is running simultaneous things at once,
and it is multitasking, and it is the iPad way.
You can have up to four apps on a stage at once,
which can look kind of ridiculous
and probably even more so on a smaller iPad,
but then you can move a whole pile of apps off stage
by switching to something else
and then bring all four of them back on at once.
It's just technically a lot happening simultaneously.
And then if you connect the iPad to an external display,
finally, finally, the iPad doesn't just mirror anymore
but it actually treats it like a second display
to extend onto and lets you have up to four more piles
to the side on Stage Manager.
So you can really multitask to your heart's content
on a large display where it doesn't feel as crowded
and you can have a ton of processes happening at once.
It's impressive, but it's not perfect.
There are already some pretty well-documented downsides.
The first one just being
that it's not very widely available,
literally only M1 iPads will support this,
so resource intensive that it uses memory swaps,
so that's not very many iPads right now.
But more importantly,
I still think this is a little bit complicated
and not the most intuitive thing in the world.
Now this isn't the end of the world for a iPad power user
who's just like, "Yeah, bring on the new UI and stuff.
I'll learn it, no problem."
But are you also going to remember
that if you open an app that's already in another group,
it will open that whole group,
so you have to manually drag the app out into another group
if you wanna work in a different set of apps,
or what about that you can't make it
automatically open apps maximized
so you have to drag them to cover the whole display
or hit the dots at the top
and hit zoom every time to bring the full screen.
Or what about the fact
that there are iPhone-sized apps still,
like whatever the hell Instagram is still doing,
they don't resize at all,
and they seem to mess with the whole multitasking thing
since you can't seem to choose where it goes either.
And also the fact that this feels
like about the fifth different way to multitask on an iPad
that's buried behind some slightly obscure gestures
and is off by default.
There are still the three dots at the top
of every window if Stage Manager isn't on,
and that's how you still get into split screen apps
which again have a set number of predetermined sizes.
And that's also how you get into slide over apps,
which are the tall skinny apps
that you get to by sliding over from the side,
which by the way have an entire multitasking carousel
of their own.
You also can't drag windows straight
from an iPad to another display
so you gotta click the three dots,
then move to display and then do that same thing again
if you wanna move them back.
And the iPad does not work with a secondary display
while its own screen is off.
So like a laptop, a computer might have clamshell mode
where you close it, but it's still plugged
into a monitor you can use.
With the iPad, if this screen is off,
so is everything it's connected to.
Plus don't forget about the keyboard shortcuts.
If you have the Magic Keyboard
that goes along with the iPad.
A lot of them are the same as they are on a Mac,
but there are some that are slightly different.
It's a lot.
So I feel like you probably get what I'm saying.
The state of the iPad is fascinating.
Apple's given us an amazing piece of hardware
and it's very powerful,
and they've added a bunch of features
to try to take advantage of it,
but now in their effort to do it the iPad way,
every single time, they're walking a tight rope
between two sides where one side
is amazing, intuitive, powerful.
On the other side is a little too complicated,
a little bit unintuitive, and hard to remember.
They're just right down the middle.
For people who use an iPad, how do you use your iPad?
What do you do specifically on the iPad?
Are you a one full screen app at a time person?
You just keep it propped up in a folio,
touchscreen all the time?
Let me know in the comments section below
how you use the iPad.
And until the next one, I will continue to be confused
about the what is a computer question.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.
(upbeat music)