So WWDC happened yesterday, and yeah, I watched the whole keynote with a coffee at like 10am instead of doing actual work. New MacBook Air with the M2 chip, redesigned, flat sides, comes in a color they're calling Midnight that is basically just very dark blue and everyone's going to buy it anyway. $1199 to start. iOS 16 lets you edit and unsend texts, which honestly should have shipped in 2015. Fine, all fine, all exactly what you'd expect from an Apple event at this point.
The thing that's actually stuck with me since yesterday afternoon isn't any of that though. It's Stage Manager.
If you didn't watch: Stage Manager is the new windowing system for iPadOS 16 (and Mac too, separately) that finally lets you overlap and resize app windows on iPad instead of the weird half-and-half Split View thing we've had forever. Drag an app to the side, it shrinks into a little stack, you can pull other windows on top of it, resize things freely. It genuinely looked good in the demo. Like, actually looked like someone at Apple sat down and thought "what if the iPad could multitask like a real computer" for the first time since Split View launched.
And then you get to the fine print and it's M1 iPads only.
Not "iPad Pro and up." Not even "recent iPads." M1 specifically. So the 2021 iPad Pro, fine, sure, that's the flagship, expected. But that also cuts out the 2020 iPad Air, which Apple sold as basically a mini Pro for two years and which plenty of people (myself very much included, I bought mine in early 2021 because I didn't want to spend Pro money) bought specifically because it felt future-proof. It's got a great screen, it's fast, it does everything I need day to day. And as of yesterday it's apparently not fast enough to draw overlapping windows on a 2022 iPad OS release.
I get the technical argument, sort of. Apple's line (via some of the reporting after the keynote, not that they dwelled on it during the show itself) is that Stage Manager needs the extra RAM and the faster storage swap that come with M1 to feel smooth when you've got four or five apps stacked and virtual memory doing its thing. Maybe that's true! I'm not a chip engineer. But it's also incredibly convenient that the answer to "which iPads support the good new feature" happens to line up exactly with "which iPads Apple would like you to buy next."
This isn't a new pattern for them, obviously. They've been doing the tiered-feature thing with iPhones for years, this year it's stuff like Live Text in video that needs A12 or later, whatever. But there's something that stings a little more about a multitasking layout getting gated by silicon, because multitasking isn't really a horsepower feature the way live translation or some ML photo trick is. It's window management. My 2015 MacBook could drag windows around fine. It feels like a decision made partly for real technical reasons and partly to draw a line under a $600 device and call it legacy fourteen months after it launched.
Anyway. I'll probably still install the iPadOS 16 beta on this thing when it drops in a few weeks, because half the appeal of a beta is seeing what you're missing, in a self-destructive sort of way. And to be clear I'm not saying the Air is bad or that I regret buying it, it does what I need it to do every single day. I just didn't expect "does it support the marquee feature of the next OS" to become a live question again this soon.
The rest of the keynote, for what it's worth: Freeform (a whiteboard app, collaborative, fine, I'll use it twice and forget it exists), passkeys as a password replacement which I think is actually the most important thing they announced and nobody's going to talk about it because it's not shiny, and Continuity Camera letting your iPhone act as a webcam for your Mac which I will absolutely be trying the second the software lands, because my laptop's built in camera makes me look like I live in a cave.
More on the M2 stuff once reviews start showing up, probably in a couple weeks.