Well, it finally showed up. iPadOS 16 landed today, a good six weeks after iOS 16 shipped on the phone, and I've spent my lunch break plus most of this evening poking at it instead of doing anything productive. Apple pulled iPadOS 16 out of the September release at basically the last minute back in August, which at the time felt like a bad sign, and having used it for a few hours now I think that instinct was right, at least partly.
The headline feature is Stage Manager, the new windowing system that lets you resize and layer app windows on the iPad instead of being stuck with Split View and Slide Over forever. I've wanted proper overlapping windows on iPad since I bought my first one, so I was genuinely excited. Then I went to plug my iPad into my monitor to try the external display support, which is the part I actually cared about, and got nothing. Turns out Stage Manager's external display mode only works on iPads with the M1 chip — the 2021 iPad Pro and this year's iPad Air. My iPad is an 11-inch Pro from 2020, which is not exactly an antique, and it just doesn't get that piece of it at all. You still get Stage Manager itself on older models going back a few years, just without the second-screen part. I get that there's a real technical reason (something about the display engine and how many apps it can composite at once), but it still stings a bit to buy a $799 tablet two years ago and watch a headline feature quietly step around it.
Anyway, complaining aside, Stage Manager on the iPad itself is actually pretty good once you get past the learning curve. You drag windows to the edge of the screen to stack them, tap the thumbnail strip on the left to swap between groups of apps, and resize things by dragging the corner like you would on a Mac. It's not quite as fluid as macOS windowing yet, there's some lag when you're moving multiple things around, but it's the first time using the iPad for actual multi-app work has felt less like fighting the OS.
iOS 16.1 also went out today on the phone side, and honestly some of that update matters more day-to-day than Stage Manager does. Live Activities finally opened up to third-party developers, so apps can now push those persistent lock-screen cards with live-updating info instead of just Apple's own stuff. I don't have a use for it yet since none of the apps I actually use have shipped support, but I can already picture it being genuinely useful for something like tracking a delivery or a game score, less useful for the fifty apps that are going to abuse it for engagement notifications dressed up as "activities."
The other one worth mentioning is iCloud Shared Photo Library, which lets you set up a shared library between up to six people that automatically pulls in photos based on rules you set, like anyone in the shot or anything taken after a certain date. My partner and I have been manually forwarding baby photos back and forth in a shared album for months, so this might actually replace that. Haven't set it up yet, want to see if anyone hits a sync disaster first before I trust it with two years of photos.
Also quietly in this release: Matter support showed up in the Home app. Matter is the new cross-platform smart home standard that Apple, Google, Amazon and a pile of other companies have been building together, and the actual spec only got finalized a few weeks ago. Having Apple, Google and Amazon devices all technically able to talk to the same smart bulb without three separate apps is the kind of thing that sounds boring but would fix a genuinely annoying problem. I don't have any Matter-certified devices yet since basically nothing has shipped with the certification sticker, so this is a "check back in six months" kind of feature for now.
I'll probably write more about Stage Manager once I've lived with it for a week instead of one very distracted evening. For now: worth updating for, worth being a little annoyed about the external display thing, and worth remembering that "delayed a software release" from Apple usually means "we knew it wasn't done" rather than "we were just being cautious."