The Long Road to the iPad’s ‘Mac-Like Multitasking’ ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, of Ars Technica, also got to interview Craig Federighi, though he focused on the iPad multitasking announcements instead of Siri delays:

“We decided this time: make everything we can make available,” said Federighi, “even if it has some nuances on older hardware, because we saw so much demand [for Stage Manager].”

That slight change in approach, combined with other behind-the-scenes optimizations, makes the new multitasking model more widely compatible than Stage Manager is. There are still limits on those devices—not to the number of windows you can open, but to how many of those windows can be active and up-to-date at once. And true multi-monitor support would remain the purview of the faster, more-expensive models.

“We have discovered many, many optimizations,” Federighi said. “We re-architected our windowing system and we re-architected the way that we manage background tasks, background processing, that enabled us to squeeze more out of other devices than we were able to do at the time we introduced Stage Manager.”

Among my many frustrations with iPadOS is how, since its debut, it has aggressively kicked backgrounded apps out of memory, particularly older Safari tabs. This is because it only barely has virtual memory, and only then for specific tasks on some hardware.

Even if there is no real swapping in iPadOS 26, I hope this indicates tabs can linger for longer in the background. The ability to juggle multiple tasks without requiring reloading information is a bare minimum requirement for “Mac-like multitasking” in my view. I look forward to finding out from reviewers if this has been accomplished.