Federico Viticci, a well-known member of the Apple community and founder of Mac Stories, has a lot of pointed criticism for Stage Manager on iPad. And Apple celebrates the 20th Anniversary of Shazam, the famous Apple-owned music recognition tool.
Shazam turns 20
Today Apple recognised and celebrated the contributions that Shazam has provided to the music experience over the past 20 years. In a press release, Apple shared some fun details such as the most Shazamed track, the top songs recognised by genre and many more.
For those who weren’t aware, Shazam actually began its life as a text messaging music recognition service in the UK. It later went on to become one of the first apps in the App Store before being acquired by Apple for $400 million in 2018.
Apple has also created a playlist of the most Shazamed song in each year of the service’s 20-year life span. It is embedded below for your convenience.
Stage Manager takes the heat
With the introduction of iPadOS 16, Apple announced Stage Manager. The new feature set enables more powerful multitasking on iPad with overlapping windows. Since its introduction in the beta of iPadOS 16, Apple has faced backlash over certain parts of the new feature.
Stage Manager is only available on iPad models with an M1 Chip, namely the 2021 iPad Pro and the 2022 iPad Air. Apple states that the reason for this is that only the unified memory architecture of the M1 chip is capable of offering the performance needed by Stage Manager.
Viticci however has levelled criticism, not at the availability of the feature, but its fundamental implementation. Stage Manager is also available on macOS Ventura but behaves very differently. For example, on the iPad, the primary app in use moved to the centre of the ‘stage’. On the Mac, by contrast, Stage Manager works to perfectly position apps to reduce clutter.
As it currently stands, the iPad implementation is missing a couple of key features as pointed out by Viticci. Firstly, when connected to an external display, if you click on an app icon in the dock that forms part of an existing workspace, it sends the entire workspace back to the iPad. Secondly, it isn’t possible to send an entire workspace to an external monitor (or vice versa). Just individual apps.
The AppleTLDR take
This all leads me to believe that Apple will delay Stage Manager. And if they aren’t planning to do that, then they absolutely should. It has great potential but it needs to be done well and ship in a polished state.
Beyond questionable feature decisions and availability of Stage Manager, in its current form in iPadOS 16 beta, it remains very buggy. Even in this late stage of the beta process. The OS is currently in its 6th developer beta and should be feeling more refined and stable at this point in the cycle.