The haters are wrong. Stage Manager for iPad is great.
I’ve been using Stage Manager on iPadOS a lot lately, and it’s causing me to love the iPad more than ever.
I go through seasons in which I’m really into iPadOS and using my iPad constantly, and then other seasons where I’m more focused on the Mac. Prior to the advent of the M1 chip for the Mac, I was using my MacBook Pro less and less, preferring to work off of my iPad. But the advent of Apple silicon on the Mac reinvigorated my twenty plus year love of the Mac, and my iPad had been feeling neglected for the last couple of years.
Lately though, I’ve been spending more time with iPad, specifically a 12.9-inch iPad Pro (4th generation) paired with the Magic Keyboard case. And the magnet for my renewed interest in iPadOS is Stage Manager. For those unfamiliar, Stage Manager is a new window management system built into iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura. It lets you create multiple workspaces (stages) in which you can group apps together.
For example, I keep Messages and Twitter in one Stage, Mail and Microsoft Teams in another, and have several single-app stages. With my single-app stages (like for Safari or Notes) I have the app window smaller than full-screen, sort of hovering over the iPadOS equivalent of the Mac’s Desktop, and with the Dock visible below it. If the app or apps don’t take up too much room on the screen, you can actually see the four most recent stages tiled along the left side of the screen, which makes it easy to switch to another stage. You can also swipe to the right from the left side of the screen to bring the stage tiles back onto the screen if they’re not visible.
You can also manually resize windows, though not with the precision of window resizing on macOS. Similarly, you can move windows around on the screen, but you can’t quite place them anywhere on the screen the way you can on a Mac. They’ll sort of snap into some predefined positions relative to each other and the other onscreen elements. But generally I find that really pleasant actually. I actually spend a fair amount of time fiddling with exact window size and placement on my Mac.
So why has Stage Manager gotten so much hate? Well, it was generally somewhat rough in its initial implementation, though Apple has improved it greatly already as subsequent iPadOS 16 point releases have shipped. I very rarely have issues with it, and to the extent that I do have issues (like with an app being unresponsive) I’m not even sure Stage Manager is to blame for those issues.
Another reason for the hate is that there’s a very vocal minority of people (though who seemingly make up a lot of the corporate tech press) who have been demanding that Apple port macOS itself to the iPad. (I think that would be a mistake for a whole host of reasons I won’t get into here.) Stage Manager brings window management to iPadOS in a way that is superficially “Mac-like” while hewing true to the unique touch-first operating system that iPadOS is. But if nothing short of macOS on an iPad will satisfy you, then Stage Manager will never be enough.
Sadly, because of the overwhelmingly negative coverage of Stage Manager on iPadOS, I fear that the well has been poisoned for regular users who haven’t experienced Stage Manager for themselves, but have only read these unfavorable reviews of it.
But I genuinely love Stage Manager, and I hope Apple doesn’t abandon it in an attempt to mollify their critics. In fact, I recently sent an email to Craig Federighi, who leads Apple’s software teams to thank him for Stage Manager and to tell him how much I’m enjoying it. I think too often we take completely for granted the work of useful software tools, and it’s worth expressing appreciation to the people responsible when we can. Federighi actually wrote back to me to tell me he was glad that I’m enjoying Stage Manager on my iPad, and that he uses it on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro as well.
If you haven’t enabled Stage Manger on your compatible iPad yet, give it a try. It’s worth spending some time with it to see if it’s right for you. It probably won’t do much to improve your workflow if you’re a casual iPad user, but if you’re actually interested in using your iPad as a laptop replacement, I think you’ll enjoy it.
I think there's a couple of reasons for people's dislike of Stage Manager:
1. Limited availability (I didn't get external monitor support in 2022 despite buying an iPad Pro in 2020)
2. The potential it could have had. At the moment, I use the standard Split View/Split Screen style of multitasking. Stage Manager just doesn't work for me, and it looks like this is the case for many of the people who dislike Stage Manager.
You made a good point however—it's important for people to try out Stage Manager to see if it fits them.
I have the current iPad Air and think sometimes it might be a little cramped for Stage Manager. I’ll admit, I haven’t given it the time it deserves since I now have a 14 MBP right at hand, so I go back to it constantly as a crutch because I’ve been using a Mac for...well a really long time. Maybe it’s time to give it another chance with a Bluetooth keyboard. I genuinely wish I had an external monitor though. I really want to try that.
As to the press - I’m tired of so much of it. They’re constantly hostile towards everything Apple does - there’s one site I won’t mention that seems to be constantly anti-Apple in its coverage. (And I won’t get into all those rooting for Twitter to fail - what the heck is that all about??) Jackals all - and so completely disconnected from normies.
But, one thing I think that doesn’t get sufficient coverage is what the next generation is going to expect in their computers. For example - my daughter has a ChromeBook for school that has a touchscreen. She LOVES it and frequently comments on how she wishes her MacBook Air had a touchscreen too. Because that’s what she knows. My older kids are much more like me - “why on earth would you want smudges on your laptop screen?” “Why would you ever want to take your hands off the keyboard/trackpad to touch the screen?” And yet, that’s what she wants. I wonder if Apple is going to be forced by the market to add that down the road because the youngs won’t buy a computer without a touchscreen. I sure hope not. I like the abstraction of a trackpad, and Apple is the only company that makes a good one.
Good article. I always appreciate your takes; aware of reality and not reflexively hostile.