We just got some hot new deets from the markedly momentous Markus Gurmuntus, a.k.a Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg; apparently iPadOS 16 just got slapped with a delay that looks to be around a month long. Ouch. Let’s see how bad the damage is.
Per Gurman, the delay is due to Apple’s efforts to completely change the way you multitask on your iPad – we’re talking about Stage Manager, and if you keep up with da news you’d know Mark Gurman hates Stage Manager more than he hates Jon Prosser.
It’s not exactly the worst news however, Apple tends to stagger their major software releases like iPadOS and iOS to not clog the barrel as it were; though this delay does make it seem like Stage Manager is really stumping Apple here. Throughout beta testing, the feature has drawn its fair share of criticism from all corners of the internet:
To put it bluntly. This isn’t the multitasking that we were looking for.
Michael Long via Medium.com
We don’t know for certain yet if this delay will bring with it major changes to Stage Manager or not, but it does push iPadOS 16 to some time in October which is right in line with macOS Ventura release. Another benefit of the delay would be allowing Apple to devote more resources into prepping iOS 16 for release in September with iPhone 14, it gives them a lil’ cushion of delay-ness.
iPadOS 16 will also have a suite of features that I’m sure Apple can put more work into, like improvements to Messages, external display support and just general usability stuff. Who knows, this delay may end up being a good thing, it’s not the end of the world if the update is a month late ands ends up better for it.
The delay of iPadOS 16 does also align with Apple’s behavior this year, it seems most if not all of their software releases have been behind schedule in one way or another. Mark Gurman agrees:
Even before the additional delay, Apple’s software releases have been slightly behind schedule this year, with the public beta phase of the updates starting later than usual. But the company has dealt with these kinds of hitches before.
Mark Gurman
Although a famous quote by Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo tends to ring true for these situations: “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” Now he’s of course referring to video games, not silly little iPad updates but it remains true.
Don’t rush your sh*t out, people will just sh*t on it. So go ahead, Apple, work on Stage Manager – and let’s try to make it suck less
