The State of Stage Manager on iPadOS 18, is it Enough? | A Complete Walkthrough

so I've been using some form of an iPad Pro as my main computer since around 2019 and with the introduction of stage manager back with iPad OS 16 it definitely kind of changed how people view the iPad a little bit because we finally have floaty windows we finally have some form of multitasking and it allows you to really get a Des setup going like you have behind me with the iPad Pro so now with the M4 iPad Pro I've been running iPad OS 18 beta 1 for about a week now and I wanted to walk through stage manager specifically walk around exactly how to use it what it entails and see if there were any improvements either from a quality of life standpoint or actually feature set of improvements that make the iPad Pro more of a computer replacement for the vast majority of people so without further Ado let's talk about stage manager the state of it on iPad OS 18 let's get into [Music] it well all right everyone let's get right into this and the first thing I do want to talk about is just a complete walkthrough of what stage manager is how to use it what iPads are compatible with it and the difference between stage manager and then secondary monitor support so when it comes to supported devices for the I IP Ad Pro for stage manager specifically on device you can use a 2018 iPad Pro or newer in order to run stage manager that means a 2018 12.9in iPad Pro which is technically the third generation or the first generation 11-in iPad Pro as well and then obviously any owered iPad so the iPad Air with the M1 or M2 can also use things like stage manager and Stage manager is a different multitasking form of windwing on the iPad itself so when the iPad first came out or when we got I believe iPad OS 12 or iOS 12 we did have something called split view so for instance if I open up something like Safari back then we'd be able to do something called split view which we can kind of just scroll down and this still technically works but if I grab the files at move this over you now have two side by-side windows that are identical in size then you can resize with this middle tab right here to make one smaller and one much larger and then same thing goes the other way you can resize them as you see fit and then you can also pull down here and even pull down another one here and kind of lay it over and then it will replace the one that you put it over and then lastly when it comes to the the final form of multitasking here is you can actually pull this up put it kind of in the middle here and then you have a quote unquote floating window now this is still all available you can still use it this way some people still like using split view because it gives you two identically sized apps and if you're going to be living in those apps then it makes total sense but then you have something called stage manager so if I go here and turn on stage manager which is right here this little icon you can turn it on in a couple different ways which I'll show you but the first way to activate stage manager can be through your control center you just tap on that and then you can see that all of a sudden the windows have completely changed sizes they're floating you can move them around you can also like I mentioned earlier resize them and then you have these floating windows which again look a little bit more Mac OS like and they kind of function that way and then of course you can pull your dock up to open up different ones and it is a little bit different on how you actually open applications if you want to keep them in view so for instance if I just tap on the calendar app it'll move everything out of the way and then open up the calendar app versus something on Mac OS it'll just open up with the rest of them so if I want to actually open up the rest of these I have to pull to the side which is a new view and then move them in one by one if I want to but if I want to use it and be able to open up an application without closing the other ones I just grab something like the files app move it over and then it stays all persistent so again different ways to use this multitasking View and form it takes a little bit of getting used to but once you do figure it out it works exceptionally well right you have the ability to then hover over with the mouse and scroll here with the magic Trackpad and if I just hover over here same scroll and now resizes pretty much an infinite amount of times whereas with the first version of stage manager you only had a few different views versus here you kind of resize it and leave it where you want as well and also before it used to kind of go to the middle whenever you open up an app but now you can kind of place it wherever you want and have different sizes for apps and things like that so that is the way that stage manager kind of runs and works and then the next thing I want to touch on is the actual settings of stage manager so if I open this up and you can see that it opens up in a different view so whenever you are in stage manager the dock does technically go away and I'm going to show you how you can keep it persistent but to bring it back up you kind of just slide your mouse down and pull it up with some inertia the idea here is to like push your finger all the way down and then it pops up but if I make this thing full screen which I can right here by pulling this down I am now in full screen mode and what I can do here is go into my multitasking and gestures and then you have the ability to look at the different forms of multitasking you can completely turn it off you can do split view with slide over which is the first way that I actually showed you which is the more traditional route of multitasking on the iPad and then you have something like stage manager and the next setting you want to look at is the recent apps as well as the doc so if I turn this on that means that when I am in stage manager View and I kind of make this smaller that means the doc will always stay persistent which depending on who you are you might like that you might not but for inance if I want to pull up something like the notes app and as long as the window is small enough the actual icons will then be on the bottom at all times and that's the dock so then if I turn on the recent apps over here that means we actually have the recent apps that can stay persistent over here so this let you see all the different apps that are open at one time and the way that this is all organized is you can have up to four different applications running in the stage manager View at one time which is over here but then you can have four instances of those four apps running so technically I believe you can have up to 20 different apps running at the same time depending on which iPad you have and how much RAM you have that's going to allow you to kind of have as many of these running in the background as possible but that gives you an idea of what can be done and how much can kind of stay on your memory when it does it open up and then when you click on one of these for instance it brings up all of them together right so if I prb this one it'll bring all these together so that is something to take into consideration when it comes to how you navigate these applications some other navigation tools to know when it comes to Stage manager are these three dots up here this is where you're going to kind of live when it comes to managing these windows so you can enter full screen mode which you just tap here it goes in full screen mode you can add another window you can minimize it which does minimize it all the way down to here which is a little bit more familiar when it comes to comparing it to something like Mac OS then you can go back here to your three dots and you can actually move it to the display which we'll touch on in a little bit about what secondary monitor display looks like and then you can actually add another window so we'll move this to the side and open up notes so that allows two applications to be running together and that's how you move one note from the other one and then also to take into consideration is that you can have multiple instances of the same application very similar to having multiple tabs or multiple windows on something like Safari obviously depends on which application like you you wouldn't need two versions of the home app or two versions of the settings app but you can have two versions of safari one way to do this is to grab an open tab already and kind of move it over to the side until it opens up like a window and now you have Safari here and you have Safari here and then another way to bring it up is to actually go into Safari the application right click or use two fingers to tap on it you can add new tab new private tab show all windows require face ID and in order to add another instance you just press show all windows and it'll show all the windows that are open that relate to actually Safari and you can press plus to add another Safari so you can have as many instances of safari as you want and again this is all on a per app basis depending on if these apps do have the ability to add multiple instances of itself so but that is what you get when it comes to Stage manager on the iPad itself and like I mentioned most iPad Pros do actually support this but now let's go to the bigger screen and see what we're dealing with there okay so as you can see I got my M4 iPad Pro right here I have a 34-in BenQ monitor up there and I'm just going to plug it in via the Thunderbolt cable so once you plug in the monitor then you do get a brand new view of an extended monitor of the iPad and iPad OS now when it comes to supported devices you do need an owered iPad for secondary monitor support so those 2018 iPad Pros with the a12x and the a12z unfortunately do not support extended monitor support now you can mirror your display with any iPad as long as you have a dongle whether it is USBC to HDMI or whatever the case may be but you do need at least an M1 powered iPad in order to be able to do this and get true secondary monitor support now the first thing I'm going to show off when it comes to this secondary monitor support is make sure to go to your settings go to display in brightness and make sure that it's arranged correctly so you can see here that it does show both displays which is nice so I can click on the Ben Q monitor kind of it has its own kind of settings that you can play with display Zoom more space you know default larger text I like to have as much space as possible you can go with HDR or SDR and then allow display mode changes as well and then of course you have your built-in Retina Display and you can kind of play with that as you see fit but you want to make sure you're arranged correctly and for the most part it does figure it out on its own but let's say if I move my iPad over here I want it to be arranged that way I just tap on this side right here and then press set and I'll be good to go now in terms of how many extended monitors you can have you can only have one extended monitor connected to your iPad your iPad needs to be turned on at all times for instance if I lock the iPad the screen itself will go black and now if I go back into the lock screen then it does open it up again and then you're good to go so unfortunately there is no real clamshell mode you can technically if you want make sure it doesn't lock when it closes so you can technically close it down and be able to use that extended monitor but there is no true clamshell mode which is very unfortunate but just something to consider when you do actually use your iPad Pro in this kind of setup and the way that I'm actually connected is via this Cal digigit ts4 which is my favorite Hub of all time and basically have one cable from there go to the iPad and then I have a cable going from The Hub over to the Monitor and it's also connected to a bunch of other peripherals which I love to see so you can see I have my SSD right there it's connected to a wired speaker behind it as well I have a bunch of other stuff connected to it and what's beautiful about this is that this M4 iPad Pro is a thunderbolt enabled device so it can handle pretty much any peripheral that you throw at it so when it comes to peripherals it can handle pretty much anything so for instance if I want to pull up the actual files over here and show you guys that I actually have this side view and my t7 shield is plugged in you have the ability to then use your t7 shield and use it very easily even though it's connected to the hub and not the actual device itself the way iPad OS treats this is almost like two separate entities so for instance let's open up something like Safari let's pull the files app open here again let's open up another instance of safari let's grab this window and open up another Safari and then let's open up the notes app as well right so you have all these apps open on the actual extended monitor so everything works as intended I'm using my magic keyboard to control everything but then you can actually go back down to your iPad itself and open up something like Luma Fusion right in window view open up the settings app right here in window view so so this kind of treated like two separate devices and what I mean by that is if I go into multitasking mode I'm only going into multitasking mode down here and then I would have to move my mouse up here to then go to multitasking mode up here and then again that's how you view everything and quit out of stuff so again that's just kind of how things are treated but some of the new stuff we got with iPad 18 is the ability to actually move stuff between the two displays so I can actually grab this and drag it up which is something that we didn't have before which is kind of interesting and then also if you have your three dots up here you have the ability to enter full screen like I said before add another window minimize but then also move to the display to actually take over that display and what I like about this is that now I can grab something like Luma Fusion enter full screen and now I have a full screen video editor of luma Fusion working off of an SSD on an extended monitor while actually having my actual iPad kind of free and being being able to kind of maybe open up the notes app or Twitter or whatever the case may be so those are all great things to have when it comes to being able to use your iPad in a pro level setting because again being able to use your iPad this way is an absolute must when it comes to actually using your iPad as a computer replacement but when it comes to iPad OS 18 there wasn't too many new additions if any to Stage manager like I mentioned the one that really jumped out to me was the ability to be able to move something like let's say the folders app and move it down here into this View and then being able to not have actually lose anything and then in that same light I can actually grab that file from here and then drag it down and move it to the files down here which is again something that we weren't able to have before another quick little tidbit that we noticed with iPad OS 18 is that yes if you click on the actual app over here on the side view it'll open up that application but if I want some more information on the app you actually click on the actual app icon itself over here on the side view and it gives you a little bit more information about how many Tabs are open what's going on in Safari and it does that with every single application It's just tough to see right now because it is in kind of like a white font and then the last thing that we're able to change is when it comes to actually like I mentioned earlier the display Zoom we also got the more space icon over here to allow you to have as much space as possible and what I do love about iPad OS is that it scales perfectly I've tested this with a smaller 27 incher like I said this is a 34 in 4k display by BenQ which is amazing I've also tested it on a 49 in 1080P display it scales absolutely great so when it comes to scaling it's actually very very good so you don't have to worry about that when it comes to buying maybe a cheaper monitor or an even very expensive monitor you know you're getting the best scaling when it comes to iPad OS on that secondary display and the last thing I do want to mention is a limitation to audio so one of the big things with Mac OS or any real kind of desktop operating system is that you can have multiple audio sources playing at once why you would want that I don't really know but some people do really enjoy that maybe having some white noise in the background from YouTube while also editing or listening to something else but unfortunately you can have only one audio Source playing at once so if I open up YouTube down here and I start to play this video right here it'll start to play which is awesome but then if I actually press play up here will do that and then press play down here it's going to pause one of them to play the other one so that is something to consider if you need two audio sources playing at once unfortunately that won't happen but one nice addition that happened with iPad OS 17 was the ability to choose where your audio is coming from before you were not allowed to actually choose what where the audio is coming from so if I did have this wired Bluetooth speaker behind me by blue ant which is something that I'm reviewing which I absolutely love then I would not be able to actually select it it would all default out of my iPad but now you can hard while you're in other speakers or default to the speakers coming out of the actual monitor or whatever the case may be so it's a little bit easier to use overall but that's going to finish up my overall look on stage manager on ipados 18 let's finish up this video so hopefully you're able to learn something new when it comes to Stage manager I wanted to give people a complete walkthrough in the beginning to know exactly what stage manager is how to use it what the settings are like what the limitations are if any and how it really changes how you use an iPad and how you can go from kind of tablet mode on the iPad which is how it was first intended to be used to now really being some sort of computer replacement now again it's not Mac OS it's not one:1 there is a little bit of a learning curve when it comes to using iPad OS over something like MACC Os or even windows but once you do figure out how to get from point A to point B on the iPad in my opinion it's just much more fun to use your iPad than it is to use a traditional laptop or desktop computer but let me know the comment down below what you think there was a lack of actual updates and improvements on iPad OS 18 there was nothing really that really stood out to me maybe some small little tweaks in here some better kind of fluidity overall but outside of that there weren't any major changes to Stage manager with the iPad OS 18 update maybe that changes with a feature beta as it releases or maybe with an 18 .1 update but that's going to do for this video Everybody if you made it to the end leave a little dolphin in the comments down below so I know that you made it to the end and leave a comment down below about what you think of stage manager is iPad Pro a computer replacement for you which iPad Pro do you have do you use stage manager and did you know that stage manager is actually available on Mac OS which is something that I never ever use but that's going to do for this video if you want to watch more videos like this one click on one of these right here and until next time I'm Fernando and I'm out everybody peace

Channel: 9to5Mac

Views: 43,294

Keywords: 9to5Mac, apple, ipados 18 stage manager, iPadOS 18, iPadOS 18 beta 1, New iPad calculator app, Math notes, Smart scribe, New Siri, Apple intelligence, iPadOS 18 iPad Pro, M4 iPad Pro, What’s new with iPadOS 18, Everything new with iPadOS 18, Should you install iPadOS 18, iPadOS 18 homescreen customizations, WWDC 2024, New stage manager, Eye tracking on iPad, hidden iPadOS 18 features, new photos apps, new ipad apps, customizing iPad

Id: ulKMXImfYqo

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024