When Apple announced its Stage Manager feature for the iPad and M1 MacBook Air earlier this year, it looked like another welcome step forward in Apple’s quest to make its tablets productivity machines.
The feature lets you effectively multitask by housing groups of apps on the side of the display as you work, that you can swap to easily.
It was locked, though, to those iPad models sporting M1 chips, meaning you had to have pretty recent hardware to get access to it.
Now, though, the latest beta for iPadOS 16 is widening that out, bringing Stage Manager support to some older tablets, namely the iPad Pro 11-inch in all its models, and third-generation or newer iPad Pro 12.9-inch models.
Interestingly, though, these models won’t be able to use Stage Manager when plugged into an external display, so that’s still a somewhat significant limitation compared to M1 tablets which can very much manage that feat.
That said, they’ll also lose the ability to extend Stage Manager to an external display when the update goes live, although Apple says it’ll return in a few months after more work has been done on it.
This paints an interesting picture for a feature that looks very cool and can be a real help when it’s working, but which has had its fair share of bugs since launching. It would seem Apple is prepared to take the time to perfect it.
