Let’s be honest: Stage Manager isn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. With this new presentation, Apple is clearly not targeting the general public, who will prefer the simplicity of a single presentation to two applications on the same screen. The group is turning here to its professional market, which will finally go much further in the management of the various applications.
While the iPad has been an increasingly comprehensive production tool for some time, Stage Manager offers enough flexibility to the touch pad to make it a unique production device for many professionals and creatives, and even more so with the support for an external screen.
We would of course have liked to be able to go further, display more applications on the screen, and even reorganize them as we wish, without being taken by the hand by iPadOS 16 which takes care of automatically aligning the apps. The iPad is not (and never will be) a Mac, although Apple strives year after year to unify these two platforms and to multiply the interface proposals to adapt to all of its users.
There are now a few weeks of work left before the release of iPadOS 16 at the start of the school year. Apple’s engineers are already on the job to respond to early feedback and bug reports from developers who are currently testing Stage Manager on their devices. See you in September 2022 to discover the final version, with perhaps a brand new iPad Pro M2 as the perfect showcase for this promising feature.