New iPadOS beta adds Stage Manager to older iPads, delays external display support

When Apple delayed the release of iPadOS 16 back in August, one of the main culprits was the new “Stage Manager”multitasking feature. Stage Manager was meant to expand on the iPad’s new multi-window multitasking model, but developers and the people who make a living from Apple have been complaining for months about stability and unpredictable behavior, issues that were still present even in the latest betas. Ironically, this feature also required a brand new iPad Pro or Air with an M1 processor.

With the iPadOS 16.1 beta released today, Apple is narrowing down Stage Manager and adjusting system requirements. According to Apple’s statement provided by Engadget, the company has “worked hard to find a way to provide a single-screen version of [Stage Manager]”for 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro users.

These models have less RAM and a less powerful processor than the fourth-generation iPad Pro M1 and iPad Air. But with four efficiency cores and four performance cores, the A12X and A12Z chips were clearly M1 test chips, and they’re still powerful enough to run iPadOS and its apps well – it’s good to see they’re getting support for Stage Manager too.

Stage Manager has also been designed for use on external displays, replacing the basic screen mirroring that most iPads can now do. Apple says external display support will remain exclusive to the iPad M1 and newer, and that it will be delayed until an iPadOS update “later this year.”

Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said in an interview earlier this year that Stage Manager only appeared on the iPad M1 because those models have extra RAM and faster flash storage (to switch to iPad storage when RAM is full) that were needed to make the feature run smoothly. But Federighi was also specifically talking about a Stage Manager version with eight apps running simultaneously, four on the iPad display and four more on the external display. Limiting Stage Manager on older iPads to a single display – and thus a total of four apps instead of eight – seemed to be an acceptable compromise for performance on older devices.

The public version of iPadOS 16 should be released sometime in October. A developer beta that adds Stage Manager to older iPads is out now, and the public version should be available in a few days.