What Does Stage Manager Manage?

A reader recently sent me a screenshot of macOS Ventura’s onboarding prompt to enable Stage Manager (as of developer beta 5). Here’s what it says:

Stage Manager

Stage Manager arranges your recent windows into a single strip for reduced clutter and quick access. Focus on one window at a time and create sets by mixing different apps to suit your workflow.

Not surprisingly, I have many thoughts on this.

First off, I am very happy to see Apple continue to embrace a vocabulary for Stage Manager. This text furthers the use of “strip”, and also formally uses “sets”. I also appreciate how the text establishes that while “Stage Manager arranges your recent windows”, it is you, the user, who “creates sets”.

That said, I find describing sets as “mixing different apps” vexing. As I have written a few times before, a set is really any user-defined collection of windows. You can create a set of windows from one app just as you can with windows from multiple apps. The seemingly deliberate use of “apps” here and in Stage Manager’s settings¹ is worrisome because conflating apps with windows feels iPad-centric to me. I am sure some might read that as shade from an old Mac curmudgeon, but it’s hard to argue otherwise. While related, apps and windows in macOS are logically separate. It’s common for an app to have multiple windows and closing a window doesn’t typically quit the app. Compare this to iPadOS where apps and windows have historically been more or less synonymous. Most apps involve just a single window, and force quitting an app in iPadOS is visually done by dismissing its window-like card.

With Stage Manager, you would think iPadOS would adopt more of macOS’s windowing paradigm, especially given the existing state of multitasking in iPadOS is so bad that a vast majority of iPad users don’t use it, let alone dare use it with multiple windows. Instead, macOS is nonsensically conflating apps and windows like iPadOS. Why? I can’t help but wonder if windows in iPadOS still only has tepid support within Apple, and that said tepidness has now bled into macOS because of a desire to make Stage Manager consistent across both platforms. The seems farfetched, but just look at how Stage Manager is described in Apple’s preview of iPadOS 16 (emphasis mine).

Introducing Stage Manager

A new way to multitask and get things done with ease. Resize windows to look the way you want. And for the first time on iPad, see multiple overlapping windows in a single view.

Switch between apps

Switch between apps seamlessly with just a tap, or a click of the mouse or trackpad.

Create your ideal workspace

Make different groups of apps for specific tasks or projects. And arrange, resize, and overlap them in your ideal layout.

External display support

Use iPad Pro or iPad Air with your external display, with resolutions up to 6K, using Stage Manager. View multiple apps on both your iPad and external display. Drag and drop files and apps between screens.

While the introduction is all about windows, every sub-section thereafter talks about apps. It’s possible that Apple prefers “apps” over “windows” for marketing purposes. “Apps” is a term Apple coined and largely owns whereas “windows” happens to be a fiendishly brilliant name used by a dominant competitor. I think that’s a fair hypothetical marketing argument, but marketing is transient. Software sticks around, and a poor label in software can last decades.

For arguments sake, let’s swap “mixing different apps” with the more accurate “combining multiple windows” .

Stage Manager arranges your recent windows into a single strip for reduced clutter and quick access. Focus on one window at a time and create sets by combining multiple windows to suit your workflow.

Not only is this description more accurate, it’s also much clearer. Comparing “one window” to “multiple apps” is apples and oranges (or I guess “apple and oranges” in this case). While it does initially organize windows by app, Stage Manager ultimately manages windows. Apple should embrace this on the Mac, which can easily have an overwhelming number of windows, and they should also embrace it on the iPad, which has long needed resizable overlapping windows. Stage Manager is an automatic window manager, one that I think could be really nice on both platforms, but obscuring the role windows in a window manager is folly and I worry could undermine that potential.