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00:00Hey, what's up, MKBHD here, and I've been using iPadOS 16 on the new iPad Pro for a little while,
00:06and one of the biggest new features on it is called Stage Manager, and I have a theory about it.
00:13Now, a lot of iPad power users like myself have been excited for this feature to drop
00:17because we've been waiting for a sort of Mac-like, real multitasking experience on the iPad.
00:24So Stage Manager comes along, and it is technically a multitasking UI, but the more I use it,
00:28the more I can sort of crystallize this theory in my head, which is that Apple doesn't seem to want
00:36the iPad to do anything the same way the Mac does it. Now, this goes back a long way. You know,
00:42when the iPad first came out, it was more or less a gigantic iPhone, but it's slowly gotten more and
00:47more powerful in front of our eyes. Until this point, we have a $1,000 iPad Pro with a 13-inch
00:54mini LED display and a whole M1 chip inside, the exact same chip that's in some of the most popular
01:00computers that they make. But the iPad software has stayed remarkably consistent, which is a nice
01:07way of saying it hasn't advanced quite at the same rate as this hardware. So a lot of people have
01:12big iPad dreams of wanting this to be their only computer and have it be just as capable as any
01:17other computer, but it hasn't been, and that's been the biggest knock on the iPad for a while.
01:20Now, sure, we've gotten some stuff. We have widgets on the home screen since iPadOS 15.
01:24We have our split screen apps. We have our slide over apps and all this stuff. But again,
01:29you'll notice that they specifically don't do anything here the same way they would on a Mac.
01:36They always want to find a new iPad way of doing it. Like when the iPad first got a trackpad and
01:42mouse support, that was a big deal. We were waiting for that. But instead of a normal mouse,
01:48we got this unique circle pointer thing that floats between possible touch targets, very much
01:54the iPad way. You might remember when I asked Craig Federighi why there wasn't a dedicated
01:58weather app and calculator app on the iPad. This was his answer. The iPad still does not have
02:05a default weather and calculator app, and they want to know why.
02:09You know, there's some things that we have not done because to do it, we would want to do
02:17something really distinctly great in that space. And I think it's obviously easy to create a
02:24calculator app. But creating one that feels like, wow, this is the greatest iPad calculator app that
02:31it felt like. I think we want to do it when we can do it really, really well. And we honestly
02:40haven't gotten around to doing it great. So that day may come. And you know, weather,
02:46be easy enough to scale up our additional, our existing weather app. But we feel like,
02:50what would a great weather app for iPad be like? Let's do that before we do it.
02:55I suppose that makes perfect sense. But listening back to that two years later,
02:58it sounds even more like we haven't really gotten around to doing it the iPad way yet.
03:04Even the headline on Apple's website for iPadOS 16, incredibly capable, unmistakably iPad. So
03:10when it comes to multitasking, this is like the last big hurdle on the iPad's way to finally
03:15feeling like it's a real computer. We all know what we expect multitasking to look like
03:20on a normal computer, like a Mac. But in accordance with my theory, and this I can't
03:25prove it, but this is just my theory is Apple doesn't ever want the iPads multitasking to look
03:33or feel or work like it does on a Mac. They've got to find a iPad way of doing this. Now to throw a
03:41wrench in my theory, this is also coming to the Mac in the latest version, but the latest feature
03:46here is called stage manager. And it's not bad. It's just an inherently new, different way of
03:54doing multitasking on a touchscreen or on a monitor like this. And it's just another thing you're
03:59going to have to learn to get the most out of this thing. So basically what it looks like is
04:02you enable it in the settings, then toggle it on in control center. Once you do, you can open up
04:07an app to bring it on stage. And then off to the left here, you have your recent apps that are
04:12offstage. So your onstage app, it's a window. It isn't quite full screen. And so you can drag the
04:18corner and move it around. And you can see that there's a bunch of slightly different predetermined
04:23window sizes. It's not perfectly fluid. It's just a bunch of sizes that Apple picked. And then you
04:29can bring other apps from offstage to be onstage at the same time. So now this is officially the
04:34first time you can have more than one windowed app open at the same time on the iPad. And again,
04:39you can mess with the sizes, you can group apps together, and then you can bring them on or off
04:43stage at will. So it is still definitely very much not the same thing as multiple windows open on a
04:48computer with the little buttons in the corner and then fully fluid window sizes and all this stuff.
04:53But it is running simultaneous things at once. And it is multitasking. And it is the iPad way,
04:59you can have up to four apps on a stage at once, which can look kind of ridiculous and probably
05:05even more so on a smaller iPad. But then you can move a whole pile of apps offstage by switching
05:10to something else and then bring all four of them back on at once. It's just technically a lot
05:15happening simultaneously. And then if you connect the iPad to an external display, finally, finally,
05:21the iPad doesn't just mirror anymore, but it actually treats it like a second display to
05:26extend onto and lets you have up to four more piles to the side on stage manager. So you can
05:31really multitask to your heart's content on a large display where it doesn't feel as crowded,
05:35and you can have a ton of processes happening at once. It's impressive, but it's not perfect.
05:39There are already some pretty well documented downsides. The first one just being that it's not
05:44very widely available. Literally only M1 iPads will support this. So resource intensive that
05:49it uses memory swap. So that's not very many iPads right now. But more importantly, I still
05:54think this is a little bit complicated and not the most intuitive thing in the world. Now, this
05:59isn't the end of the world for a iPad power user who's just like, yeah, bring on the new UI and
06:03stuff. I'll learn it. No problem. But are you also going to remember that if you open an app that's
06:07already in another group, it will open that whole group. So you have to manually drag the app out
06:12into another group if you want to work in a different set of apps. Or what about that you
06:15can't make it automatically open apps maximize. So you have to drag them to cover the whole display
06:20or hit the dots at the top and hit zoom every time to bring them to full screen. Or what about
06:25the fact that there are iPhone size apps still like whatever the hell Instagram is still doing,
06:29hence they don't resize at all. And they seem to mess with the whole multitasking thing since you
06:34can't seem to choose where it goes either. And also the fact that this feels like about the
06:38fifth different way to multitask on an iPad that's buried behind some slightly obscure gestures and
06:45is off by default. There are still the three dots at the top of every window if stage manager isn't
06:49on. And that's how you still get into split screen apps, which again have a set number of
06:53predetermined sizes. And that's also how you get into slide over apps, which are the tall skinny
06:58apps that you get to by sliding over from the side, which by the way, have an entire multitasking
07:03carousel of their own. You also can't drag windows straight from an iPad to another display. So you
07:09got to click the three dots, then move to display, and then do that same thing again, if you want to
07:14move them back. And the iPad does not work with a secondary display while its own screen is off.
07:19So like a laptop computer might have clamshell mode where you close it, but it's still plugged
07:23into a monitor you can use with the iPad. If this screen is off, so is everything is connected to
07:28plus don't forget about the keyboard shortcuts. If you have the magic keyboard that goes along
07:32with the iPad, a lot of them are the same as they are on a Mac, but there are some that are
07:36slightly different. It's a lot. So I feel like you probably get what I'm saying. The state of
07:41the iPad is fascinating. Apple's given us an amazing piece of hardware and is very powerful.
07:47And they've added a bunch of features to try to take advantage of it. But now in their effort to
07:52do it the iPad way, every single time they're walking a tightrope between two sides where one
07:58side is amazing, intuitive, powerful, and on the other side is a little too complicated,
08:04a little bit unintuitive and hard to remember. They're just right down the middle. For people
08:08who use an iPad, how do you use your iPad? What do you do specifically on the iPad? Are you a one
08:14full screen app at a time person, you just keep it propped up in a folio touchscreen all the time?
08:19Let me know in the comment section below how you use the iPad. And until the next one, I will
08:24continue to be confused about the what is a computer question. Thanks for watching. Catch
08:30you guys in the next one. Peace