![]() ![]() It’s an empty space with the same dock as the iPad shown at the bottom. This is the “Home Screen” on an external display. If your iPad has access to Stage Manager on external displays, but you don’t want to use it, you can always disable it in Settings ⇾ Displays by selecting the connected display and enabling ‘Mirror Display’ instead. Every other iPad that is otherwise compatible with the “single-screen” version of Stage Manager (using four windows at once on the iPad’s display) but does not have an M1 chip or later will continue to be limited to basic mirroring on external displays. Only the 20 iPad Pros, plus the M1 iPad Air can run Stage Manager on external displays with resolutions up to 6K. Unlike the “basic” version of Stage Manager, which was brought to older iPads after Apple announced at WWDC that it couldn’t be done due to technical concerns, external display support in Stage Manager has remained exclusive to iPad models with an M1 SoC and above. Working with Stage Manager on External Displays So now that Stage Manager has unlocked the final piece of the puzzle with external display integration, how good is it in practice?Īnd more importantly: was it worth the wait? I’ve been working toward this vision for iPad modularity and contextual computing for the past several years. (You can read the full story here.) After all, no other device in Apple’s ecosystem can effortlessly turn from a tablet into a laptop and into a desktop workstation like the iPad Pro can. As I recently wrote for Club MacStories members, I’ve put my money where my mouth is: I’ve gone all-in with Stage Manager on my iPad Pro and completely rebuilt my work setup around the M2 iPad Pro and Apple Studio Display, using Universal Control to seamlessly control iPadOS from a nearby Mac mini. Over the past couple of months, I’ve learned to live with Stage Manager, accept its quirks, and use what’s good about it to my advantage. Technically speaking, however, the performance of this mode leaves a lot to be desired, with frequent crashes on my iPad Pro and an oft-confusing design that, I will reiterate, needs a rethinking. Which is to say: conceptually, I love that Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.2 allows me to extend my iPad to an external display and put four additional windows on it I’ve waited years for this feature, and it’s finally here. With today’s release of iPadOS 16.2, the idea behind Stage Manager achieves the full vision first presented in June, while its design and technical implementation remain stuck in an unpolished, half-baked state. Despite the flawed design of its multitasking concepts and bugs I still encounter on a daily basis, it’s undeniable that Stage Manager lets me get more things done on my iPad by virtue of its concurrent app windows. As I wrote in October, I like the idea behind Stage Manager more than its implementation. Ever since I last wrote about iPadOS 16, I have continued using Stage Manager on my iPad Pro.
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