After first being announced at WWDC in June and enduring a one-month delay, Apple is now rolling out iPadOS 16 to users everywhere. iPadOS 16 includes a number of changes for iPad users, headlined by the controversial new Stage Manager multitasking feature. Here’s everything you need to know.
In most years, the major “fall” release of iPadOS is available alongside the corresponding iOS update. This year, however, Apple delayed iPadOS 16 to October and released iOS 16 in September as originally scheduled. This means that today’s release of iPadOS 16.1 is the first version of iPadOS 16 made available to the general public.
iPadOS 16.1 adds Stage Manager
iPadOS 16 includes a number of changes to the iPad experience, but most notable is the new Stage Manager multitasking feature. This feature brings an all-new windowing system to the iPad. Users can create multiple different “stages” with different-sized windows for multiple applications, then easily switch between each of those stages.
When first announced, Apple said Stage Manager would only be available on M1 iPads, including the most recent iPad Air and iPad Pro. A few weeks ago, however, the company backtracked and said that the iPad Pro models from 2018 and 2020 would also be able to use Stage Manager.
In a future release of iPadOS 16, Stage Manager will also add proper external monitor support to the iPad. This feature, however, will be limited only to the M1 (and now M2) iPad Pro models.
Stage Manager, however, has been heavily criticized despite some of the changes and improvements Apple has attempted to make since June. Over at MacStories, Federico Viticci sums it up:
Apple started from a good idea – make the iPad more useful by using more apps at once – and botched the execution in iPadOS 16.1 with an over-designed, poorly tested, muddled constellation of missing features, bugs, and confusing interactions.
The first version of Stage Manager fails to make iPad multitasking more intuitive for newcomers and more flexible for power users. Today, I struggle to understand what kind of market Stage Manager is supposed to serve.
There’s the seed of a valid idea behind Stage Manager: create a continuum between the Mac and iPad that allows power users to go beyond what iPadOS has offered thus far. But that idea has been paired with the worst technical implementation of multitasking I’ve seen from Apple in the several years I’ve been using and writing about the iPad.
What else is new in iPadOS 16.1?
In addition to Stage Manager, iPadOS 16.1 also adds many of the new features from iOS 16 as well as a few other iPad-specific tweaks:
- Messages app updates: Editing, undo send, mark as unread, and more
- Mail app updates: Undo send, rich links, scheduled send, and more
- Display scaling: A new display scaling setting increases the pixel density of the display so you can view more in your apps
- Weather app on iPad
- All-new Home app
- “Desktop-Class Apps” with customizable toolbars, new context menus, find and replace, multiselect context menus, and more.
iPadOS 16 is available to all iPad Pro models, the iPad Air 3rd generation and later, the iPad 5 and later, and the iPad mini 5 and later. You can update by heading to the Settings app, choosing General, then choosing Software Update.
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