iPadOS 16 is preparing to give a breath of fresh air to the user experience of iPads equipped with Apple M1 SoC thanks to the debut of the functionality Stage Managerwhich allows to considerably improve the multitasking capabilities of the tablets of the Cupertino house.
Yesterday we gave you a first overview of how the use of iPad changes with iPadOS 16 and many have expressed their disappointment regarding the fact that these innovations are reserved for a restricted category of iPad, leaving it dry owners of many models Pro that will not be able to access the full functionality of the new operating system.
In the presentation phase Apple did not explain why Stage Manager is exclusive to models with M1however, even from the exchange of comments in the previous article – which you find above for convenience – it emerged that one of the main reasons behind this choice could be linked to the amount of RAM available to the iPads with M1, which all start from at least 8 GBwhile the older models stop at 4 and 6 GB.
But these were more than anything else assumptions, which however today find confirmation in a recent intervention by Apple, which explained to colleagues of Digital Trends the reason behind this choice. In short, the main factor that determines the support to Stage Manager is precisely the amount of physical RAM present on the device, but there are other interesting little details as well. Let’s see what it is.
In responding to Digital Trends, Apple emphasized the role of RAM in the decision to support Stage Manager or not, but also reiterated the importance of another iPadOS 16 feature exclusive to the iPads with M1, namely the ability to access the swap memoryequal to up to 16 GB as needed.
On this point there is an important clarification to make, namely which models actually support this possibility. The official iPadOS 16 features page reports that swap memory is enabled on the 4th generation iPad Air with more than 256 GB and on the 11th and 12.9 ”iPad Pro 3rd and 5th generation respectively (those with M1), in this case without making memory distinctions.
Obviously the mention of fourth generation iPad Air is a mistakeas Apple’s sentence does not mention “fourth generation and above” And even sixth generation iPad Mini is not includedwhich has the same technical specifications on the memory front (always 4 GB of RAM and 64/256 GB, here the review) in the face of a more advanced chip than Air 4 (A15 Bionic versus A14 Bionic). The reference is therefore to the fifth generation iPad Airthe only Air with M1 (we told you about it in his review).
In addition to this it is interesting to see how swap memory support is present on the 256GB model onlywhile the basic 64 GB one seems not to be able to access this possibility. This makes us understand that the presence of swap memory is an important but not fundamental element for the Stage Manager; in the absence of the swap you simply incur in a greater number of processes blocked in the background, but it is still possible to access the new interface.
A question then arises spontaneously: why iPad Pro 2020 – equipped with SoC A12Z Bionic, 6 GB of RAM and at least 128 GB of internal memory (here our review of the time) – it was cut off from the game? Also in this case the intervention of Apple comes to our aid, which underlines that at the moment M1 is its only mobile chip capable of satisfactorily managing memory swap between RAM and storagemaking the data transfer invisible to the user which allows an app to become active even after being parked in swap memory.
Considering that 5th generation iPad Air is also able to manage Stage Manager swap-free due to its 8 GB of RAM, iPad Pro 2020 is in an unfortunate position, where its RAM memory is higher than that of other iPads but it is not enough and its SoC is powerful but derives from an architecture that is too old – it is still based on A12 Bionic of 2018 – and therefore not able to correctly support a function introduced 4 years after its design.
Probably, if Apple had wanted to, they could have found a way to allow this iPad to access a stripped down version of Stage Manager in order to be compatible with its 6 GB of RAM, but in the end it wouldn’t have changed much compared to 3-app multitasking that has already been available for some time.
Forced implementation of swap memory is not a good idea, as we have seen several times how – especially in the Android field – the use of this resource does not always return a good fluidity for applications that transit from one state to another. We will see if even the iPads with M1 will suffer from these problems or if the SoC is actually able to make a difference in this case too.
