# Apple Over-Engineered Stage Manager, but Picasso and an Atari 520ST can fix It
Rumour is that Apple will delay iPadOS 16 until October because Stage Manager isn’t ready for the big time
When Apple finally announced iPad support for overlapping windows and an external monitor at WWDC 22, I almost cheered. I write “almost” because Apple hid it behind Stage Manager. Stage what?
Stage Manager, if you haven’t heard, will be available on the next versions of macOS and iPadOS. It enables you to group together apps and switch between them quickly.
Say you are writing about llamas.(Who isn’t?) You could group together Apple Notes, Safari, and Ulysses. Look up the key facts on [Animal Corner]with Safari, and make notes on Apple Notes. Easily refer to both as you draft on Ulysses.
Need to check out what’s going on in the world? Tap on a group with Apple News and Mail. It switches instantaneously.
Almost as an aside, Apple showed Stage Manager on an iPad displaying overlapping, resizable windows on an external monitor. That brought a broad smile to my face. Finally.
Managing apps in groups isn’t a bad idea. If that also delivers the long wished for external monitor/overlapping windows support, great! I couldn’t wait for the public beta, and said so here.
Then it all turned a little sour. Stage Manager could only run on a M1 iPad, This meant that most iPad owners could only watch enviously as M1 iPad users enjoyed extended screen real estate.
Luckily for me, I bought a M1 iPad Pro last year, so my dreams of doing what other computers have been doing for decades wasn’t dead. It did seem unlikely that that kind of power was needed, though, but that’s Apple for you.
I had mixed feelings when I installed and tried out the public iPadOS beta. On the plus side, I loved the freedom of an iPad working with an external monitor. I’m never going back to a world where an iPad can only work with a 12.9” screen.
On the negative side, my word, Apple have made a real hash of overlapping, resizable windows. Turns out that I’m not the only one who thinks so. It’s rumoured to be one of the reasons Apple is delaying iPadOS until October.
Why is adding overlapping windows to iPadOS proving trickier than expected? App groups is a new idea, and Apple seems unsure about how it should work.
You can’t just tap an app on the dock to add it to the current group. That creates a new group, so you have to tell Stage Manager explicitly that you want to add a new app to the current group.
Close the last app on the current group, and Stage Manager disappears. I was expecting it to switch to another group. Why’s that a problem? The only way to bring up Stage Manager again is to tap on an app already in a group. It doesn’t matter which app.
Before you say it: this is a beta, and Apple will iron out most of those wrinkles. That’s why pencils have erasers and software has beta programmes. The public beta programme also lets you enjoy the benefits of a monitor now, so shut up.
I know, but here is what really concerns me. Apple has made something simple look really difficult. Worse, it’s saying that something simple needs a M1 processor.
Overlapping, resizable windows is not rocket science. I bought an Atari 520ST in the early 1990s. It could do that very efficiently and effectively, using a 68000 CPU and 520 MB of RAM.
That wasn’t a typo; it really only had 520 megabytes of RAM.
Either Apple has the worst software engineers in history (it doesn’t), or it’s trying too hard. It can’t just be overlapping, resizable windows like nearly every other computer on earth. No, it has to juggle apps with Pixar level animations, or something.
Just copy what’s worked on the Mac for years. Don’t get me wrong, window management on a Mac isn’t perfect. In fact, there are people out there making a living out of fixing it.
Perfect or not, windowing on Mac is, however, good enough.
Apple should know better. I read in the New York Times that new Apple designers have to learn about Picasso. Why? Picasso represented what he saw and felt with the bare minimum necessary.
Apple just has to do a bare minimum necessary solution for overlapping, resizable windows on an external monitor. That would also mean that more iPad users would benefit.
Why’s that a bad thing, Apple?