The iPad just took a huge leap toward replacing your laptop
New features in iPadOS 16 are bringing an iPad-only future (for those who want it) a lot closer to the present.
Let’s be honest - most people who buy an iPad aren’t looking a device with the power and flexibility to be a true Mac or PC laptop replacement. Most iPad customers are just looking for a great tablet. But there are a small, but passionate (and growing) group of fans who want to do all of their computing on an iPad, and I admit I used to be one of them. Why do I say I used to be one of them? Well, for me, the Mac just got a lot better with the introduction of macOS Big Sur and Apple silicon. But even though I’m spending less time on my iPad these days, I’m very excited about a future I’ve long believed is coming in which students go through their entire college experience using an iPad instead of a traditional laptop, and then ask for an iPad when they start their career in corporate America. And that future just got a lot closer thanks to Apple’s iPad-focused announcements at its WWDC keynote on Monday.
During the Mac portion of the keynote, Apple introduced Stage Manager, a new window management system for organizing groups of windows on the Mac, and it’s also coming to iPadOS. That’s significant, because although Apple has been slowly adding more advanced app management tools for having more than one app on screen at a time on the iPad, the iPad has never had true app windows in the way that the Mac has where you can dynamically resize and overlap them. Additionally, Apple has addressed another longstanding power user request: full external display support. Together, these new features represent a major boost in potential productivity and multitasking on the iPad.
With Stage Manager enabled, you can see the Dock at the bottom of the screen where you’ve pinned all of your most frequently-used apps. But you now get vertical list of recent apps on the left side of the screen. Let’s say you have Safari open and you open Calendar from the Dock. You’ve now created a grouping of apps. Until you ungroup them, that stack of apps stays together. If you switch over to a different app from the Stage Manager vertical list, you can click to go right back to your group of apps. This reminds me a lot of the original implementation of Spaces in macOS in 2007. I really liked that initial version of Spaces, so I’m eager to try out Stage Manager on both iPadOS and macOS.
With Stage Manager enabled, you can dynamically resize app windows on the iPad, similar to how app windows work on the Mac. Until I try it, I’m personally a little skeptical of how beneficial this will be when using just the iPad’s built-in display, particularly on the 11-inch iPad Pro and iPad Air. Apple did mention in the keynote that there are new display scaling tools in iPadOS, so it may be that you can adjust this in a satisfactory way. We’ll see.
To me the real power begins when you connect your iPad to an external display. Prior to iPadOS 16, external display support for the iPad has been of extremely limited value. You mostly just got screen mirroring. But since the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio is different than the typical 16:9 found on most external displays, you got unpleasant pillar bars on the sides of the external monitor.
With iPadOS 16, the iPad now takes full advantage of an external display, and extends your desktop. This is a very desktop-like experience, and on a large external display, Stage Manager and multiple overlapping windows make much more sense. This is a huge productivity gain for those using an iPad in “laptop mode” with either Apple’s Magic Keyboard case/stand or an external keyboard and mouse.
What I like about Stage Manager, is that it allowed Apple to bring advanced, desktop-class features to the iPad without compromising the iPad’s tablet-first mission. There are a lot of users who have been screaming at Apple to port macOS to the iPad for years. My argument has always been that those users fundamentally don’t understand why Apple created the iPad. Whereas the Mac has always been purpose built for mouse-based input, iPadOS has always been built for touch-first input. As Apple has grown the iPad’s feature set, it has added additional input methods that complement this touch-first approach without changing it. iPad has always been about reconceptualizing what a computer is and how it functions.
The downside to Stage Manager and this new full external display support, is that you have to have an iPad with an M1 processor. That’s a steep requirement given that you have to have the current generation iPad Pro or iPad Air to get this feature. My 4th-generation iPad Air, purchased not much more than six months ago, can’t use Stage Manager. That may not be too grating to most iPad customers given that these are features they’d probably never use anyway, but it’s bad news for anyone who would like to try these new features but can’t.
This is certainly not a review. I’m going to need to get my hands on an iPad that supports Stage Manager and really spend some time with it to fully evaluate it, but conceptually it looks like a great solution to a longstanding problem for iPad power users. Could you see yourself using an iPad as your main computing device? More users than ever before will be able to rethink the definition of “computer” this Fall when iPadOS 16 ships.