The main novelty of iPadOS 16 returns to the center of attention again, thanks to a recent discovery made by the colleagues of 9to5Mac. We obviously speak of Stage Managerthe new mode that introduces a floating window interface on iPads equipped with M1 SoCs and which we have also talked about in a dedicated in-depth study.
Digging into the iPadOS 16 code, 9to5Mac discovered the existence of a setting accessible only to Apple personnel that allows you to activate Stage Manager even on iPads that do not use a chip based on M1 or later. In particular the option allows you to to enable Chamois on Legacy devicesthus making it possible to access the interface even on tablets that are not currently supported.
Chamois is the internal reference used by Apple to indicate Stage Manager, a function that the Cupertino house has relegated exclusively to the most powerful models for several reasons that have been explained by Craig Federighi himself, including the presence of particularly fast memories and a graphic sector able to manage the new UI without problems.
The presence of this hidden feature is nothing particularly significant, as it only proves that it actually does Apple also tested Stage Manager on iPads with SoCs other than M1, but it does not give us any indication regarding the performance found. Probably it will be only the community to give a satisfactory answer in this sense, perhaps through the activation of Stage Manager through the jailbreak.
Despite this, in the past we have seen Apple change its mind about other features that were initially presented as exclusive to a certain category of devices, such as Live Text on macOS Montereyavailable at first only on Macs with M1, but then also later on Intel ones during the beta phase.
The debate that arose around Stage Manager could therefore push Apple to support at least one category of iPad cut out of the function, namely the iPad Pro 2020 which with its 6 GB of RAM on all variants could manage a reduced version of Stage Manager without too much difficulty, while this will hardly be possible on models with 4 GB of RAM or less. Hope is the last to die and the iPadOS 16 beta path is still long; who knows that things may not change in the coming months.
