Can your Apple device still do everything?

There is frustration amongst Apple users that not all devices can use all the key features Apple offers

- CHARLOTTE HENRY

It has long been the case that older devices have been unable to take advantage of all the new features Apple offers when it upgrades its operating systems. Indeed, this is true of tech firms more broadly, and it can often be for good reason, namely that a hardware upgrade helps facilitate that new software feature. We’ve seen this with the iPhone’s camera many times.

This issue came to the fore once again in the wake of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. While there was much excitement about the forthcoming features unveiled at WWDC, it quickly emerged that lots of people would not be able to use them.

The key example of this is Stage Manager, which greatly improves multitasking on the iPad, allowing for multiple overlapping windows. It also provides full support for external displays with a resolution of up to 6K. Pulling back the curtain on Stage Manager was a major part of the WWDC, but it will only be available to users with iPads powered by the M1 chip or later. And that means that, at the time of writing, it will only work on the most recent iPad Pro and iPad Air.

Not surprisingly, this did not go down well with some Apple users. Upon learning his 2018 iPad would not have access to Stage Manager, Ben Lovejoy, European Editor at 9to5Mac wrote:

“The official reason for this is that the M1 has faster access to storage and that M1 iPads – like M1/M2 Macs – use RAM and SSD storage interchangeably when needed. But given that macOS runs just fine on an A12Z chip, I’m sure that my A12X Bionic-powered iPad could cope with Stage Manager. I strongly suspect this is just Apple wanting to sell more iPads.”