Most of the recent iPads are as powerful as mid-range laptops, but they aren’t arguably as functional. Apple knows this, and they have been hard at work baking in extra functionality. With the iPadOS 16 presentation at WWDC, Apple introduced a new feature called Stage Manager, which brought unapparelled multitasking ability to the new iPads. Stage Manager allowed users to resize windows, keep multiple of them open at once on a single screen, and much more.
According to what my source reported, Apple is working on the Irvine project, the evolution of stage manager. On iPad, the relationship with macOS should change. It’s expected next year with iPadOS 17
— Majin Bu (@MajinBuOfficial) August 30, 2022
Now, according to Twitter user Majin Bu, sharing information from an unnamed source, stated that Apple is working on Project Irvine, which is the evolution of Stage Manager. Moreover according to him, the evolved Stage Manager will ship with iPadOS 17.
Sadly, as good as a feature Store Manager is, there are two big drawbacks at this point. One being that as of now the feature is exclusive to M1 iPads, and that other that the experience itself is very buggy and inconsistent.
Stage Manager is a fully integrated experience that provides all-new windowing experience that is incredibly fast and responsive and allow users to run 8 apps simultaneously across iPad and an external display with up to 6K resolution. Delivering this experience with the immediacy users expect from iPad’s touch-first experience requires large internal memory, incredibly fast storage, and flexible external display I/O, all of which are delivered by iPads with the M1 chip.
Apple did explain why that was the case with the statement above, but limiting it to the M1 iPads leaves out a lot of recent powerful devices out, including the 2018 iPad pro, which should be capable of running Stage Manager. Hopefully with the rumored Stage Manager evolution coming with iPadOS 17, Apple will rework some of that software to enable it for older devices.
As for the bugs, Apple is still working on those. Mark Gurman, from Bloomberg even reported recently that Apple will likely delay the iPadOS 16 release by a month. It is speculated that the delay is mostly due to ongoing problems with Stage Manager.
I finally went ahead and *disabled* Stage Manager on my iPad Pro. For now.
As much as I love using 3-4 apps at once, the implementation just isn’t there yet. Crashes every few minutes; hard to use multi-window for the same app; UI glitches everywhere.
I hope Apple delays this.
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) August 18, 2022
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